Towards Hardware-Assisted Security for IoT Systems

Abstract

As computing devices become more commonplace in every day life, we have seen an increase of possible attacks on commercial devices and critical infrastructure. As a result, both academia and industry have proposed solutions to mitigate or outright eliminate the ever expanding set of viable targets. Initially, this resulted in an influx of software-based defenses against these emerging threats. Unfortunately, it was found that software solutions could be bypassed with more advanced attacks and often resulted in high performance overhead. As such, hardware-assisted security defenses have been developed to provide improved security while keeping performance overhead to manageable levels, especially for IoT devices. In this paper, we will provide a survey of prominent hardware-assisted security defenses. We will enumerate the attacks these defenses aim to protect, as well as their effectiveness. We will also discuss the implications in both performance and system design. A comparison between approaches that target the same set of issues, and possible directions for future research will be presented.