Countermeasures for Hardening Embedded Security

The impact of attacks on Internet of Things (IoT) embedded devices range from threatening lives, such as attacks on wearable/implantable health devices, to threatening infrastructures in financial, transportation, and other sectors. In the IoT realm, hardware is distributed and embedded in our environment and must be hardened against malicious intentional and unintentional attack. Despite advances in hardening software systems using security fixes, attacks on embedded hardware remain feasible with few known defenses. Although generally attackers cannot launch their own malicious software on these embedded devices, low cost non-invasive attacks such as electromagnetic fault injection can have a detrimental impact on and often break the embedded security. This research involves hardening the embedded processor using new software and hardware countermeasures to thwart electromagnetic fault injection. These countermeasures will be verified on real embedded hardware and licensed for use to provide increased hardening and security for many embedded processor systems.

Faculty Supervisor:

Catherine H Gebotys

Student:

Karim Amin;Mahmoud Khalafalla

Partner:

Thinktum

Discipline:

Engineering - computer / electrical

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Waterloo