Abstract
Internet of Things (IoT) consists of several tiny devices connected together to form a collaborative computing environment. IoT imposes peculiar constraints in terms of connectivity, computational power and energy budget, which make it significantly different from those contemplated by the canonical doctrine of security in distributed systems. In order to circumvent the problem of security in IoT domain, networks and devices need to be secured. In this paper, we consider the embedded device security only, assuming that network security is properly in place. It can be noticed that the existence of tiny computing devices that form ubiquity in IoT domain are very much vulnerable to different security attacks. In this work, we provide the requirements of embedded security, the solutions to resists different attacks and the technology for resisting temper proofing of the embedded devices by the concept of trusted computing. Our paper attempts to address the issue of security for data at rest. Addressing this issue is equivalent to addressing the security issue of the hardware platform. Our work also partially helps in addressing securing data in transit.
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless and mobile communication technologies are already widely deployed and their capabilities are ever increasing. New technologies, such as WiMAX, ZigBee, Wireless Mesh Networks, and 4G Networks emerge giving rise to the notion of ubiquitous computing. The vision of Mark Weiser in his famous 1991 article “The Computer of the 21st Century”, according to which “the most profound technologies are those that disappear; they weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it,” is today a reality [1]. Dix et al. define ubiquitous computing as: “Any computing activity that permits human interaction away from a single workstation” [2]. Since then, there have been tremendous advances in mobile and wireless technologies toward supporting the envisioned ubiquitous and continuous computation and, consequently, ubiquitous applications that are intended to exploit the foregoing technologies have emerged and are constantly pervading our life [3]. We can observe that from cars to smart phones, refrigerators to multimedia players - embedded computing increasingly pervade our lives. But most of them are unsecured in nature. Security for these systems is an open question and could prove a more difficult long-term problem than security does today for desktop and enterprise computing. Security issues are nothing new for embedded systems.
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
With the advent of pervasive nature of today’s computing, security is becoming very critical for wide range of applications. As most of today’s and next generation computing applications involve embedded systems, in this work, we have presented the requirements, issues, designs and solutions of embedded design to counter the different attacks. While some aspects of security have been addressed in the context of traditional general-purpose computing systems, embedded systems usher in many new challenges. We have highlighted the security-related problems faced by designers of embedded systems, and outlined recent developments and innovations to address them. Several issues, however, still remain open to find a holistic solution to the problem of embedded system security.
