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In recent years we have seen an explosion in the usage of low-cost, low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) in embedded devices around us due to the popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Although this is good from an economics…
Embedded devices are ubiquitous. However, preliminary evidence shows that attack mitigations protecting our desktops/servers/phones are missing in embedded devices, posing a significant threat to embedded security. To this end, this paper…
Memory corruption vulnerabilities have been around for decades and rank among the most prevalent vulnerabilities in embedded systems. Yet this constrained environment poses unique design and implementation challenges that significantly…
This article presents a hardware-based memory isolation solution for constrained devices. Existing solutions target high-end embedded systems (typically ARM Cortex-A with a Memory Management Unit, MMU) such as seL4 or Pip (formally verified…
Almost all modern hardware, from phone SoCs to high-end servers with accelerators, contain memory translation and protection hardware like IOMMUs, firewalls, and lookup tables which make it impossible to reason about, and enforce protection…
Arm Cortex-M processors are the most widely used 32-bit microcontrollers among embedded and Internet-of-Things devices. Despite the widespread usage, there has been little effort in summarizing their hardware security features,…
Not long ago, it was thought that only software applications and general purpose digital systems i.e. computers were prone to various types of attacks against their security. The underlying hardware, hardware implementations of these…
Embedded systems play a crucial role in fueling the growth of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) in application domains such as healthcare, home automation, transportation, etc. However, their increasingly network-connected nature, coupled with…
The widening spectrum of applications and services provided by portable and embedded devices bring a new dimension of concerns in security. Most of those embedded systems (pay-TV, PDAs, mobile phones, etc...) make use of external memory. As…
Modern operating systems (OSes) have unfettered access to application data, assuming that applications trust them. This assumption, however, is problematic under many scenarios where either the OS provider is not trustworthy or the OS can…
Modern computing systems are limited in performance by the memory bandwidth available to processors, a problem known as the memory wall. Processing-in-Memory (PIM) promises to substantially improve this problem by moving processing closer…
The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled novel user-centred applications, including many in safety-critical areas such as healthcare, smart environment security, and emergency response systems. The diversity in IoT…
Internet of Things devices are widely adopted by the general population. People today are more connected than ever before. The widespread use and low-cost driven construction of these devices in a competitive marketplace render…
ARM recently introduced a security feature called Memory Tagging Extension or MTE, which is designed to defend against common memory safety vulnerabilities, such as buffer overflow and use after free. In this paper, we examine three aspects…
Existing high-end embedded systems face frequent security attacks. Software compartmentalization is one technique to limit the attacks' effects to the compromised compartment and not the entire system. Unfortunately, the existing…
Machine learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly being integrated into embedded and IoT systems that surround us, and they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. The deployment of these ML algorithms on resource-limited embedded platforms…
Graphics processing units (GPUs) power many intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and automated driving applications, but remain largely unmonitored for safety and security. This article highlights GPU misuse as a critical blind spot,…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly increasing the number of connected devices. This causes new concerns towards solutions for authenticating numerous IoT devices. Most of these devices are resource-constrained. Therefore, the use of…
Embedded and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have seen an increase in adoption in many domains. The security of these devices is of great importance as they are often used to control critical infrastructure, medical devices, and vehicles.…
In an increasingly interconnected world, protecting electronic devices has grown more crucial because of the dangers of data extraction, reverse engineering, and hardware tampering. Producing chips in a third-party manufacturing company can…