Security on IoT devices with secure elements
Tobias Schläpfer, Andreas Rüst · Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften digital collection (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) · 2019
The emergence of new low power IoT networks in which leaf nodes have native IPv6 connectivity and the grown awareness for data protection of IoT devices require leaf nodes to provide a higher level of security, similar to the level of a standard computer system. Especially in terms of energy consumption and device cost, the intensive cryptographic operations of well-known computer security algorithms are a big challenge for resource constrained devices. To face these challenges, semiconductor vendors have recently introduced new dedicated hardware, so called secure elements. These devices provide hardware accelerated support for cryptographic operations and tamper proof memory for the secure storage of cryptographically sensitive material. Moreover, they employ specific techniques against so called side channel attacks. The paper describes and specifies different classes of secure elements and discusses their opportunities and challenges. Furthermore, the paper provides multiple detailed examples how secure elements can be used for different applications. Finally, this paper briefly presents general measurement results from a performed evaluation with four selected secure elements from different vendors. A more complete report about the performed evaluation will be presented in a following paper. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of secure elements and provide a generic overview of their features, serving as starting point to work with secure elements.