A mutual auditing framework to protect IoT against hardware Trojans

Internet-of-Things (IoT), wherein sensor nodes of different types are used to monitor different objects, are expected to be used in many critical domains. However, hardware Trojans, which are malicious modifications implanted in individual nodes, may utilize the wireless connection facility to leak confidential information or to collude with each other to cause catastrophic failures in the IoT. To defend against these types of network-level threats, our goal is to develop a lightweight framework to monitor communications in the IoT. Instead of relying on a centralized data center to monitor the behavior of all the nodes, we propose to exploit vendor diversity among the nodes to build a distributed framework wherein nodes monitor the trustworthiness of their neighbors. This mutual auditing scheme is able to detect any attempt to leak information or collude with other malicious nodes, thus constructing trustworthy communication channels between untrustworthy nodes.