A chip-level security framework for assessing sensor data integrity: work-in-progress

Abstract

The continuously increasing inter-connectivity of sensor nodes that form the basis of the Internet-of-Things results in new avenues of attack exploitable by adversaries to maliciously modify data captured by these nodes. In this work, we present a framework for detecting malicious hardware alterations that attempt to attack state-of-the-art microchips that form these sensor nodes. Specifically, we focus on extremely small Hardware Trojans (HTs) that attempt to modify sensor data right away as the data is received on a state-of-the-art chip fabricated in an untrusted facility. We present a dual-chip approach composed of an untrusted state-of-the-art prover chip and a trusted verifier chip, where the verifier continuously challenges the prover at run-time to ensure correct operation and assess the integrity of the captured data. Our preliminary analysis of the proposed mechanism shows that HT attacks anywhere on the untrusted state-of-the-art chip are detected and flagged preventing maliciously altered data to be transmitted out of the sensor node.