Energy Efficient Memory Authentication Mechanism in Embedded Systems

The pervasiveness of modern day embedded systems has led to the storing of huge amount of sensitive information in them. These embedded devices have to often operate under insecure environments and hence are susceptible to software and physical attacks. Hence security becomes a prime concern in embedded systems. Although a lot of hardware cryptographic techniques have been proposed to provide high levels of security, they are hampered by the trade-offs created by the energy constraints in embedded systems. In this paper, we propose an Energy Efficient Memory Integrity Verification Mechanism that can adaptively tune a Memory Integrity Verification Module( MIV) to a Sensor Module(SM). This drastically reduces the energy overheads imposed on an embedded system as compared to the conventional security mechanisms. The simulation results help us conclude that the average energy saved in our mechanism ranges from 88% to 99%. This is much higher as compared to the results achieved in baseline simulations with traditional memory integrity verification techniques.