SECCS: SECure Context Saving for IoT Devices

TL;DR

This paper introduces SECCS, a hardware-based approach for secure context saving in IoT devices that protects stored data from tampering and theft, ensuring confidentiality and integrity during energy-saving states.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hardware module integrated into SoCs that enhances security for context saving in energy-constrained IoT devices.

Findings

Provides confidentiality and integrity for saved context data

Easy to implement hardware module within existing SoC designs

Enhances security without significant energy overhead

Abstract

Energy consumption of IoT devices is a very important issue. For this reason, many techniques have been developed to allow IoT nodes to be aware of the amount of available energy. When energy is missing, the device halts and saves its state. One of those techniques is context saving, relying on the use of Non-Volatile Memories (NVM) to store and restore the state of the device. However, this information, as far as IoT devices deal with security, might be the target of attacks, including tampering and theft of confidential data. In this paper, we propose a SECure Context Saving (SECCS) approach that provides a context saving procedure and a hardware module easy to implement inside a System on Chip (SoC). This approach provides both confidentiality and integrity to all the CPU content saved into the target NVM.