SECCS: SECure Context Saving for IoT Devices
This addresses security vulnerabilities in energy-aware IoT devices, but it is incremental as it builds on existing context-saving techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of securing context saving for IoT devices against tampering and data theft, proposing SECCS, a hardware module that provides confidentiality and integrity for CPU content stored in non-volatile memory.
Energy consumption of IoT devices is a very important issue. For this reason, many techniques have been developed to allow IoT nodes to be aware of the amount of available energy. When energy is missing, the device halts and saves its state. One of those techniques is context saving, relying on the use of Non-Volatile Memories (NVM) to store and restore the state of the device. However, this information, as far as IoT devices deal with security, might be the target of attacks, including tampering and theft of confidential data. In this paper, we propose a SECure Context Saving (SECCS) approach that provides a context saving procedure and a hardware module easy to implement inside a System on Chip (SoC). This approach provides both confidentiality and integrity to all the CPU content saved into the target NVM.