Providing Confidentiality and Integrity in Ultra Low Power IoT Devices

IoT devices for low power applications often rely on energy harvesting techniques. In these implementations, IoT nodes must be aware of the amount of available energy. When the energy is about to run out, they need to halt and save the context of the CPU, which is restored as soon as the energy is available again. Some of the existing techniques rely on the transfer of the scan chains content to a Non-Volatile Memory (NVM). However, the saved state of the device might be the target of malicious attacks, including tampering and theft of confidential data. One solution is to provide the encryption and the integrity of context data. In this paper, we propose the implementation of an additional module interposed between the CPU and the NVM, which provides both these security features.