Security of IoT systems: Design challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Computer-aided design (CAD), in its quest to facilitate new design revolutions, is again on the brink of changing its scope. Following both historical and recent technological and application trends, one can identify several emerging research and development directions in which CAD approaches and techniques may have major impacts. Among them, due to the potential to fundamentally alter everyday life as well as how science and engineering systems are designed and operated, the Internet of Things (IoT) stands out. IoT also poses an extraordinary system replete with conceptual and technical challenges. For instance, greatly reduced quantitative bounds on acceptable area and energy metrics require qualitative breakthroughs in design and optimization techniques. Most likely the most demanding of requirements for the widespread realization of many IoT visions is security. IoT security has an exceptionally wide scope in at least four dimensions. In terms of security scope it includes rarely addressed tasks such as trusted sensing, computation, communication, privacy, and digital forgetting. It also asks for new and better techniques for the protection of hardware, software, and data that considers the possibility of physical access to IoT devices. Sensors and actuators are common components of IoT devices and pose several unique security challenges including the integrity of physical signals and actuating events. Finally, during processing of collected data, one can envision many semantic attacks. Our strategic objective is to provide an impetus for the development of IoT CAD security techniques. We start by presenting a brief survey of IoT challenges and opportunities with an emphasis on security issues. Next, we discuss the potential of hardware-based IoT security approaches. Finally, we conclude with several case studies that advocate the use of stable PUFs and digital PPUFs for several IoT security protocols.