Optimal Checkpointing for Secure Intermittently-Powered IoT Devices

TL;DR

This paper introduces an online checkpointing policy for energy-harvesting IoT devices that balances security and performance, significantly reducing execution time despite encryption overheads.

Contribution

It presents a novel checkpointing strategy that optimally determines when to checkpoint, improving execution efficiency over existing methods that ignore encryption costs.

Findings

Execution time improved up to 1.4x

Effective security with encrypted checkpoints

Adaptive checkpointing reduces overheads

Abstract

Energy harvesting is a promising solution to power Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Due to the intermittent nature of these energy sources, one cannot guarantee forward progress of program execution. Prior work has advocated for checkpointing the intermediate state to off-chip non-volatile memory (NVM). Encrypting checkpoints addresses the security concern, but significantly increases the checkpointing overheads. In this paper, we propose a new online checkpointing policy that judiciously determines when to checkpoint so as to minimize application time to completion while guaranteeing security. Compared to state-of-the-art checkpointing schemes that do not account for the overheads of encrypted checkpoints we improve execution time up to 1.4x.