A Survey on Hardware-based Security Mechanisms for Internet of Things
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The vast areas of applications for IoTs in future smart cities, industrial automation, smart transportation systems, and smart health facilities represent a thriving surface for several security attacks with enormous economic, environmental and societal impacts. This survey paper presents a review of several security challenges of emerging IoT networks and discusses some of the attacks and their countermeasures based on different domains in IoT networks. Most conventional security solutions for IoT networks are adopted from communication networks while noting the particular characteristics of IoT networks such as the huge number of nodes, heterogeneity of the network, and the limited energy, communication, and computation of the nodes, these conventional security methods are not really adequate. One important challenge toward utilizing common secret key-based cryptographic methods in very large scale IoT networks is the problem of secret key generation, distribution, and storage in IoT devices and more importantly protecting these secret keys from physical attacks. Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are recently utilized as a promising hardware security solution for identification and authentication in IoT networks. Since PUFs extract the unique hardware characteristics, they potentially offer an affordable and practical solution for secret key generation. However, several barriers limit the applications of different types of PUFs for key generation purposes. We discuss the advantages of PUF-based key generation methods, review the state-of-the-art techniques in this field and propose a reliable PUF-based solution for secret key generation using resistive random-access memories (RERAMs) embedded in IoTs.
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