Internet of Things (IoT) devices are mostly small and operate wirelessly on limited battery supply, and therefore have stringent constraints on power consumption and hardware resources. Therefore, energy-efficient (low energy) design is paramount for the successful deployment of resource constrained IoT devices. Further, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have evolved as a popular hardware security primitive for low cost, mass produced IoT devices with very constrained resources. Energy harvesting technologies utilizing solar cells are being used in ultra-low power IoT devices to satisfy the energy requirement. In this paper, we utilize the intrinsic variations in solar cells to design a novel solar cell based PUF. As a proof of concept, we have used the Tiva TM4C123GH6PM microcontroller to build our solar cell based PUF. From our experiments, we found that the proposed solar cell based PUF has the uniformity value of 49.21% which is close to the ideal value of 50%. Further, the proposed solar cell based PUF has worst case reliabilities of 92.97% and 90.62% with variations in temperature and light intensity, respectively.
A PUF-based Approach for Sustainable Cybersecurity in Smart Agriculture
The simplicity, low cost, and scalability of Internet of Things (IoT) devices have led researchers to study their applications in a wide range of areas such as Healthcare, Transportation, and Agriculture. IoT devices help farmers to monitor the conditions in a field. These are connected to edge devices for real-time analysis. The edge servers send commands to actuators in the farm directly, without human intervention. At the same time, security vulnerabilities are a big concern, concomitant with the increasing utilization of IoT devices. If the duplication of an IoT device occurs and attackers gain access to the system, then the integrity of the entire ecosystem will be at stake, regardless of the application domain. This paper presents a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) based hardware security primitive for the authentication of Internet of Agro-Things (IoAT) devices. The proposed security scheme has been prototyped with a testbed evaluation. An arbiter PUF module has been used for the validation of the proposed scheme. The PUF based security primitive is lightweight, scalable, and robust as it mainly depends on inherent manufacturing variations, thereby ensuring no chance for the duplication of IoT devices.
- Editors:
- Padhy, Sudarsan; Oria, Vincent
- Award ID(s):
- 2101181
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10327491
- Journal Name:
- 2021 19th OITS International Conference on Information Technology (OCIT)
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 375 to 380
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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