Michael Chesser

Yang Su, Michael Chesser, Yansong Gao et al.

Emerging ultra-low-power tiny scale computing devices in Cyber-Physical Systems %and Internet of Things (IoT) run on harvested energy, are intermittently powered, have limited computational capability, and perform sensing and actuation functions under the control of a dedicated firmware operating without the supervisory control of an operating system. Wirelessly updating or patching the firmware of such devices is inevitable. We consider the challenging problem of simultaneous and secure firmware updates or patching for a typical class of such devices -- Computational Radio Frequency Identification (CRFID) devices. We propose Wisecr, the first secure and simultaneous wireless code dissemination mechanism to multiple devices that prevent malicious code injection attacks and intellectual property (IP) theft, whilst enabling remote attestation of code installation. Importantly, Wisecr is engineered to comply with existing ISO compliant communication protocol standards employed by CRFID devices and systems. We comprehensively evaluate Wisecr's overhead, demonstrate its implementation over standards-compliant protocols, analyze its security and implement an end-to-end realization with popular CRFID devices -- the open-source code is released on GitHub.

Yang Su, Yansong Gao, Michael Chesser et al.

The simplicity of deployment and perpetual operation of energy harvesting devices provides a compelling proposition for a new class of edge devices for the Internet of Things. In particular, Computational Radio Frequency Identification (CRFID) devices are an emerging class of battery-free, computational, sensing enhanced devices that harvest all of their energy for operation. Despite wireless connectivity and powering, secure wireless firmware updates remains an open challenge for CRFID devices due to: intermittent powering, limited computational capabilities, and the absence of a supervisory operating system. We present, for the first time, a secure wireless code dissemination (SecuCode) mechanism for CRFIDs by entangling a device intrinsic hardware security primitive Static Random Access Memory Physical Unclonable Function (SRAM PUF) to a firmware update protocol. The design of SecuCode: i) overcomes the resource-constrained and intermittently powered nature of the CRFID devices; ii) is fully compatible with existing communication protocols employed by CRFID devices in particular, ISO-18000-6C protocol; and ii) is built upon a standard and industry compliant firmware compilation and update method realized by extending a recent framework for firmware updates provided by Texas Instruments. We build an end-to-end SecuCode implementation and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate standards compliance, evaluate performance and security.