Trustworthy and Privacy-Aware Sensing for Internet of Things

TL;DR

This paper presents lightweight, hardware-based security mechanisms using physically unclonable functions (PUFs) to enhance trustworthiness and privacy in IoT sensing, demonstrated on multiple hardware platforms with low overhead.

Contribution

Introduction of PUF-based security schemes for trusted sensing and privacy in IoT, with implementation and evaluation on diverse hardware platforms.

Findings

Low latency and storage overhead demonstrated

Effective protection of sensed data and sensor nodes

Feasibility shown on multiple hardware platforms

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is considered as the key enabling technology for smart services. Security and privacy are particularly open challenges for IoT applications due to the widespread use of commodity devices. This work introduces two hardware-based lightweight security mechanisms to ensure sensed data trustworthiness (i.e., sensed data protection and sensor node protection) and usage privacy of the sensors (i.e., privacy-aware reporting of the sensed data) for centralized and decentralized IoT applications. Physically unclonable functions (PUF) form the basis of both proposed mechanisms. To demonstrate the feasibility of our PUF-based approach, we have implemented and evaluated PUFs on three platforms (Atmel 8-bit MCU, ARM Cortex M4 32 bit MCU, and Zynq7010 SoC) with varying complexities. We have also implemented our trusted sensing and privacy-aware reporting scheme (for centralized applications) and secure node scheme (for decentralized applications) on a visual sensor node comprising an OV5642 image sensor and a Zynq7010 SoC. Our experimental evaluation shows a low overhead wrt.~latency, storage, hardware, and communication incurred by our security mechanisms.