ABSTRACT
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the youngest offspring of the big data technology that emerged in late the 1990s. The interconnectivity among smart devices (e.g., wearables and phones) in various domains (e.g., biomedical, smart grids, and banking) allows the storage and exchange of tera bytes of data over different mediums of communication (e.g., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zig-bee). This scenario motivates forgeries and hackers to steal, mimic, and clone the essential information and sell it in digital black market at cheaper rate without leaving any evidence of crime. Therefore, it is very dreadful situation where monitoring and encrypting solutions do not turn around the fate. Furthermore, unlike a general purpose gadget, IoT devices are small and dedicated units, which should deliver their services with the minimum permitted power. Therefore, looking a security solution for such diverse and sophisticated systems is not a cake walk but need keen observation and beyond the box thinking. Hence, we motto as electronics engineers is to bring self-defensive IoT hardwares, which provide unique and random physical layer security solutions. As it is said that, “if roots are strong and deep enough, a healthy tree flourishes indefinitely”. Hence, in this chapter we are mainly focused on the physical or hardware layer security solutions for IoT devices through their unique inevitable materialistic properties that have been inherited by them during chip manufacturing explained through examples and case studies. The rest of this chapter is organized as follows: Section 10.1 discusses the brief introduction about the resource constrained nature of IoT platform, their security concerns and importance of protecting the physical layer. Section 10.2 explains various hardware security threats that an IoT platform is facing. Section 10.3 discusses the reach of available hardware security solutions for IoT domain. Section 10.4 explains the latest promising hardware security solution known as Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), which offer the unique, random, and reliable self-defensive features for the IoT modules. Section 10.5 discusses the role of emerging nanotechnology in IoT devices for enhancing the security while overcoming the resource limitations without compromising area, power, delay, and cost factors. Finally, all the essential points have been concluded in summary section.
