Towards Hardware-Assisted Security for IoT Systems

As computing devices become more commonplace in every day life, we have seen an increase of possible attacks on commercial devices and critical infrastructure. As a result, both academia and industry have proposed solutions to mitigate or outright eliminate the ever expanding set of viable targets. Initially, this resulted in an influx of software-based defenses against these emerging threats. Unfortunately, it was found that software solutions could be bypassed with more advanced attacks and often resulted in high performance overhead. As such, hardware-assisted security defenses have been developed to provide improved security while keeping performance overhead to manageable levels, especially for IoT devices. In this paper, we will provide a survey of prominent hardware-assisted security defenses. We will enumerate the attacks these defenses aim to protect, as well as their effectiveness. We will also discuss the implications in both performance and system design. A comparison between approaches that target the same set of issues, and possible directions for future research will be presented.