When Hardware Security Moves to the Edge and Fog

The emergence of edge and fog computing paradigm brings significant advantages to the ubiquitous cloud computing. Reduced response time and energy consumption as well as relaxed communication bandwidth requirement enable rapid advancement of mission-critical applications. Energy harvesting is an efficient and viable solution to realize sustainable operation of edge devices. The lack of continuous network connection, increased number of collaborative end-user nodes, limited energy capacity, and vast deployment of resource constrained edge devices, however, impose unprecedented security concerns. As an essential part of energy-harvesting-powered edge computing devices, an on-chip voltage regulator is leveraged in this perspective paper as a lightweight countermeasure against charging and certain side-channel attacks through, respectively, reconfiguration of the impedance matching network and randomization of the power consumption profile. Security adaptive on-chip power delivery thus enables trustworthy edge and fog computing with negligible power and area overhead.