Protecting IoT Devices through a Hardware-driven Memory Verification

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) devices are appearing in all aspects of our digital life. As such, they have become prime targets for attackers and hackers. An adequate protection against attacks is only possible when the confidentiality and integrity of the data and applications of these devices are secured. State-of-the-art solutions mostly address software and network attacks, but overlook physical/hardware attacks. Such attacks can still exploit software vulnerabilities or even introduce them. In this paper, we present embedded memory security (EMS); it protects against physical tampering of the memory of IoT devices. As a case study, we have equipped a RISC-V based system-on-chip (SoC) with an EMS module. Our experimental results show that EMS successfully can protect the SoC against hardware tampering attacks, while having a low performance overhead.