On Misconception of Hardware and Cost in IoT Security and Privacy
Bryan Pearson, Lan Luo, Yue Zhang, Rajib Kumar Dey, Zhen Ling, Mostafa A. Bassiouni, Xinwen Fu · 2019
The popularity of IoT has raised grave security and privacy concerns. There is a misconception that security and privacy issues of IoT systems are caused by the hardware and its cost. In this paper, we will explore the use of microcontrollers (MCUs) and crypto modules in IoT applications and demonstrate that hardware and cost may not be the bottleneck of IoT security and privacy in various application domains. We discuss how to implement hardware security, system/firmware security, network security, and data security with the low-cost Espressif's ESP32, TI's CC3220 and Microchip's cryptographic co-processor ATECC608A. We perform extensive experiments to validate the performance of cryptographic and networking operations of IoT devices based on those and other MCUs and crypto modules. We are the first to perform a comprehensive measurement and comparison of cryptographic and networking performance of these modern IoT MCUs and modules.