LWSEE: Lightweight Secured Software-Based Execution Environment

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become increasingly prevalent and used to handle sensitive and critical data. This demands mechanisms to ensure data security, protect privacy, and promote the general safety of IoT-based systems. Currently, hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) are used to provide data protection, but they are not suitable for low-cost devices lacking hardware-assisted security features. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Lightweight Secured Software-based Execution Environment (LWSEE) for embedded devices. LWSEE is designed to be supported by low-cost, low-end devices without specific hardware requirements. It consists of a lightweight distributed solution that offers protection against hardware attacks, provides a comprehensive security check mechanism, enables secure application execution, and supports secure application updates to ensure the continued security of IoT devices. LWSEE comprises a secure architecture and communication protocol specially tailored to devices with constrained resources. Our experimental evaluation underlines the minimal overhead introduced by LWSEE while showing its performance in terms of execution time, CPU time, and memory usage. We examine the flexibility and adaptability of LWSEE by demonstrating that it can be configured to achieve minimal overhead (e.g., $39.8$ ms per message for the general integrity verification of a node). This approach enables IoT devices to remain secure without dedicated hardware, allowing for the widespread adoption of IoT technology while maintaining data safety.