Low-overhead Hardware Supervision for Securing an IoT Bluetooth-enabled Device: Monitoring Radio Frequency and Supply Voltage

• Published in: ACM journal on emerging technologies in computing systems 2022-01, Vol.18 (1), p.1-28, Article 6
• Main Authors: Elkanishy, Abdelrahman, Furth, Paul M., Rivera, Derrick T., Badawy, Abdel-Hameed A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Embedded systems security; Hardware; Security and privacy; Wireless devices
• ISSN: 1550-4832; 1550-4840
• DOI: 10.1145/3468064

Over the past decade, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices increased tremendously. In particular, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) expanded dramatically. Resource restrictions on IoT devices and the insufficiency of software security solutions raise the need for smart Hardware-Assisted Security (HAS) solutions. These solutions target one or more of the three C’s of IoT devices: Communication, Control, and Computation. Communication is an essential technology in the development of IoT. Bluetooth is a widely-used wireless communication protocol in small portable devices due to its low energy consumption and high transfer rates. In this work, we propose a supervisory framework to monitor and verify the operation of a Bluetooth system-on-chip (SoC) in real-time. To verify the operation of the Bluetooth SoC, we classify its transmission state in real-time to ensure a secure connection. Our overall classification accuracy is measured as 98.7%. We study both power supply current (IVDD) and RF domains to maximize the classification performance and minimize the overhead of our proposed supervisory system.