Hardware Security Evaluation Platform for MCU-Based Connected Devices: Application to Healthcare IoT

Hardware security-based threats are often ignored or poorly considered by embedded system developers who focus on their system's functional specifications. Most embedded systems utilize software-based security mechanisms such as right management or cryptography, nevertheless they can be easily defeated by hardware attacks if no specific care is given during the development of the software. Consequently, it is necessary to provide software developers with efficient tools to assist in designing robust embedded systems against hardware security threats. In this work, we focus on medical embedded systems including a microcontroller unit (MCU) running the main application. We firstly show that the software running on the MCU is vulnerable against hardware attacks; then, we present an evaluation platform dedicated to MCU-based design to evaluate and secure software early in the design phase. We finally present preliminary results obtained with this platform, considering the side channel resilience of modern MCUs.