ASSURED: Architecture for Secure Software Update of Realistic Embedded Devices

TL;DR

ASSURED is a scalable, secure firmware update framework tailored for large-scale IoT deployments, ensuring end-to-end security and demonstrating significant performance improvements over existing methods.

Contribution

It introduces ASSURED, a novel secure update architecture for IoT devices that considers deployment complexities and is validated through practical experiments.

Findings

ASSURED is faster than current update mechanisms.

It provides end-to-end security for IoT firmware updates.

Validated on commodity hardware platforms.

Abstract

Secure firmware update is an important stage in the IoT device life-cycle. Prior techniques, designed for other computational settings, are not readily suitable for IoT devices, since they do not consider idiosyncrasies of a realistic large-scale IoT deployment. This motivates our design of ASSURED, a secure and scalable update framework for IoT. ASSURED includes all stakeholders in a typical IoT update ecosystem, while providing end-to-end security between manufacturers and devices. To demonstrate its feasibility and practicality, ASSURED is instantiated and experimentally evaluated on two commodity hardware platforms. Results show that ASSURED is considerably faster than current update mechanisms in realistic settings.