What Is a Security Chip In IoT?
Two Indian researchers have built a low-energy security chip that is designed to prevent Side-Channel Attacks (SCAs) on IoT (Internet of Things) devices.
- IoT is a computing concept that describes the idea of everyday physical objects being connected to the internet and being able to identify themselves to other devices.
- It is being used to create smart infrastructure in various verticals such as Power, Automotive, Safety & Surveillance, Remote Health Management, Agriculture, Smart Homes and Smart Cities etc, using connected devices.
- Security Chip means the application specific integrated circuit that instantiates the Security Feature after being embedded in the device.
- A SCA is a security exploit that aims to gather information from or influence the program execution of a system by measuring or exploiting indirect effects of the system or its hardware — rather than targeting the program or its code directly.
- Typically, SCAs aim to extract sensitive information like cryptographic keys, proprietary machine learning models and parameters by measuring things like timing information, power consumption and electromagnetic leaks of a system.
- An SCA may also be referred to as a sidebar attack or an implementation attack.
- It can be applied to any data that you want to keep secret.
- It can be used on your smartwatch to extract your ECG and heart rate signal,”
- Types of SCAs: Timing attack, Electromagnetic (EM) attack, Acoustic, Power, Optical, memory Cache, hardware weaknesses.
- Even though SCAs are difficult to execute on most modern systems, the increasing sophistication of machine learning algorithms, greater computing power of devices and measuring devices with increasing sensitivities are making SCAs more of a reality.
