SecuCode: Intrinsic PUF Entangled Secure Wireless Code Dissemination for Computational RFID Devices

The simplicity of deployment and perpetual operation of energy harvesting devices provides a compelling proposition for a new class of edge devices for the Internet of Things. In particular, Computational Radio Frequency Identification (CRFID) devices are an emerging class of battery-free, computational, sensing enhanced devices that harvest all of their energy for operation. Despite wireless connectivity and powering, secure wireless firmware updates remains an open challenge for CRFID devices due to: intermittent powering, limited computational capabilities, and the absence of a supervisory operating system. We present, for the first time, a secure wireless code dissemination (SecuCode) mechanism for CRFIDs by entangling a device intrinsic hardware security primitive Static Random Access Memory Physical Unclonable Function (SRAM PUF) to a firmware update protocol. The design of SecuCode: i) overcomes the resource-constrained and intermittently powered nature of the CRFID devices; ii) is fully compatible with existing communication protocols employed by CRFID devices in particular, ISO-18000-6C protocol; and ii) is built upon a standard and industry compliant firmware compilation and update method realized by extending a recent framework for firmware updates provided by Texas Instruments. We build an end-to-end SecuCode implementation and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate standards compliance, evaluate performance and security.Comment: Accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computin

Dynamic AI-IoT:enabling updatable AI models in ultra-low-power 5G IoT devices

This article addresses the challenge of integrating dynamic AI capabilities into ultralow-power (ULP) IoT devices, a critical necessity in the rapidly evolving landscape of 5G and potential 6G technologies. We introduce the Dynamic AI-IoT architecture, a novel framework designed to eliminate the need for cumbersome firmware updates. This architecture leverages Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) to facilitate smooth cloud interactions and incorporates tailored firmware extensions for enabling dynamic interactions with Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) models. A sophisticated memory management mechanism, grounded in memory alignment and dynamic AI operations resolution, is introduced to efficiently handle AI tasks. Empirical experiments demonstrate the feasibility of implementing a Dynamic AI-IoT system using ULP IoT devices on a 5G testbed. The results show model updates taking less than one second and an average inference time of approximately 46 ms

Development of a Prototype Ball-and-Plate Balancing Platform

Ball-and-plate balancing platforms have been utilized throughout academia to further understanding of nonlinearities that can occur when applying control algorithms to nonholonomic and underactuated systems. The objective of this thesis is to build upon an existing ball-and-plate balancing platform used in the Intro to Mechatronics class and create a robust platform system that can be utilized by future students to test various controller designs derived from MATLAB/Simulink®. The ball-and-plate platform design uses a myriad of sensors to track the system components in real time: a resistive touch panel is used to track the position of the ball on the plate, an inertial measurement unit is used to track the orientation of the top plate, and capacitive incremental encoders attached to the brushless-DC gimbal motors are used to both track the orientation of the motor actuation arms and commutate the motors. The gimbal motors are driven using the open-source ODrive motor driver, which receives torque commands from a separate STM32 microcontroller. The STM32 microcontroller aggregates and processes the data from the touch panel and IMU, and it acts as a “middle-man” for communication between the ODrive and MATLAB/Simulink® model running on a host PC. The platform successfully handles communications between the host PC, STM32, and ODrive at a rate of 200 Hz. The platform also incorporates a serial user interface that allows for fine position control of the motor arms for zeroing the top plate before each test

BotSpine - A Generic Simple Development Platform of Smartphones and Sensors or Robotics

The Internet of Things (IoT) emergence leads to an “intelligence” technology revolution in industrial, social, environmental and almost every aspect of life and objectives. Sensor and actuators are heavily employed in industrial production and, under the trend of IoT, smart sensors are in great demand. Smartphones stand out from other computing terminals as a result of their incomparable popularity, mobility and computer comparable computing capability. However, current IoT designs are developed among diverse platforms and systems and are usually specific to applications and patterns. There is no a standardized developing interface between smartphones and sensors/electronics that is facile and rapid for either developers or consumers to connect and control through smartphones. The goal of this thesis is to develop a simple and generic platform interconnecting smartphones and sensors and/or robotics, allowing users to develop, monitor and control all types of sensors, robotics or customer electronics simply over their smartphones through the developed platform. The research is in cooperation with a local company, Environmental Instruments Canada Inc. From the perspective of research and industrial interests, the proposed platform is designed for generally applicable, low cost, low energy, easily programmed, and smartphone based sensor and/or robotic development purposes. I will build a platform interfacing smartphones and sensors including hardware, firmware structures and software application. The platform is named BotSpine and it provides an energy-efficient real-time wireless communication. This thesis also implements BotSpine by redesigning a radon sniffer robot with the developed interface, demonstrated that BotSpine is able to achieve expectations. BotSpine performs a fast and secure connection with smartphones and its command/BASIC program features render controlling and developing robotics and electronics easy and simple

Reliability and security in wellbeing monitoring embedded systems

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática e de ComputadoresAo longo dos últimos anos, a fiabilidade e a segurança dos sistemas embebidos utilizados em áreas críticas, como a saúde e o sector automóvel, têm suscitado um interesse crescente na comunidade científica e ganho maior consciencialização entre o público em geral. Esta tese aborda a modelação e a implementação de uma arquitetura software fiável e segura para um sistema embebido focado na aquisição e processamento de sinais fisiológicos, em particular o eletrocardiograma (ECG). O trabalho realizado visou o CardioWheel, um projeto em curso desenvolvido pela CardioID Technologies, destinado a aplicações nas áreas da saúde e do automóvel. As particularidades destas áreas quanto aos seus requisitos de segurança e proteção dos utilizadores servem de caso de estudo para mostrar as vantagens da arquitetura desenvolvida. Assim, no estudo realizado foi feito o levantamento dos requisitos do sistema que foram utilizados para projetar a máquina de estados da arquitetura em UML, a qual foi validada formalmente utilizando a ferramenta Uppaal e o modelo de autómatos finitos temporizados. Também foi feita uma análise de ameaças à arquitetura para validar os aspetos relacionados com a segurança. A arquitetura foi desenvolvida para microcontroladores ESP32 usando o ecossistema ESP-IDF e o FreeRTOS, para o que foram consideradas camadas independentes de hardware. A camada de comunicação é baseada no protocolo Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) e permite a transmissão dos dados do nó final para um gateway e, posteriormente, para um servidor na nuvem. A operação de atualização de firmware usando o componente Over-The-Air (OTA) foi também implementada e validada quanto à sua segurança. A arquitetura foi, inicialmente, avaliada e validada usando um protótipo laboratorial. Posteriormente, foi utilizada para realizar uma pequena série de produção do CardioWheel em que se utilizaram as estratégias de validação propostas no contexto do projeto ESCEL KDT Valu3s. Também foi realizado um ensaio pré-médico no Hospital de Santa Marta usando o CardioWheel com a arquitetura proposta, que permitiu validar a sua fiabilidade e capacidades quando comparado com um eletrocardiógrafo clínico.Recently, the reliability and cybersecurity aspects of embedded systems for critical domains, such as health and automotive, has increased interest in the research community and awareness to the general public. This thesis addresses the modelling and the implementation of a reliable and secure software architecture for an embedded system aimed at the acquisition and processing of physiological signals, in particular the electrocardiogram (ECG). The work focused CardioWheel, an ongoing project developed by CardioID Technologies, targeting health and automotive applications. These domains demand special requirements for safety and security, and serve as a showcase for the proposed architecture. Accordingly, suitable requirements were first established and the architecture state machine was developed using UML and formally validated using Uppaal and Timed Automata modelling. Then, the threat analysis of the architecture was conducted. Finally, the implementation was realized for an ESP32 microcontroller using the FreeRTOS, the ESP-IDF ecosystem, and specially developed hardware independent layers. The communication layer is based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and allows the transmission of the data from the end-node to a gateway and finally to the cloud. The system has a Over-The-Air (OTA) component that enables the update of the firmware and the security of this operation was also validated. The proposed architecture was firstly validated using a laboratory prototype. Then, it was deployed to build a small production series of CardioWheel incorporating validation strategies proposed within the context of the ESCEL KDT Valu3s project. Also, a pre-medical trial was conducted at the Hospital de Santa Marta, confirming the reliability and capabilities of our system against a clinical ground-truth.N/

PORTING OF FREERTOS ON A PYTHON VIRTUAL MACHINE FOR EMBEDDED AND IOT DEVICES

The fourth industrial revolution, The Industry 4.0, puts emphasis on the need of “Smart” and “Connected” objects through the use of services provided by Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems and cloud computing to optimize the cost, development time and remote connectivity. Development of highly scalable and flexible IoT applications is the need of time. These solutions require connectivity, less development time, time-to-market and at the same time offers a high performance and great reliability. Zerynth, a small company, provides its full stack for IoT solutions. Zerynth Virtual Machine is the core component among other components in stack which allow the programmers to code in python or hybrid C/Python coding with multithreaded Real Time OS with negligible memory footprint. The Python layer, Application Layer, is totally agnostic of underlying RTOS and hardware abstraction layer. This layered software architecture of Zerynth VM makes it totally compatible with new Industry 4.0 standard. The Hardware abstraction layer, VHAL, abstracts the hardware features of supported MCU and its peripherals while RTOS layer, VOSAL, uses the features of underlying Real Time OS. Zerynth VM can be ported with different Real Time OS and various hardware platforms depending upon the application’s cost, features and other relevant parameters. Configuring Kinetis MCU (MK64FN1M0VDC12) with existing VM became the first objective of my thesis. This configuration covers from scratch the clock, boot loading and peripheral support. Since previous version of Zerynth VM had a support of only Chibi2 OS which has certain dependency on the hardware layer underneath so this became another objective to separate the Chibi2 OS from VHAL layer for total independence. Finally, Porting of FreeRTOS on Zerynth VM with Hexiwear MCU as target board could a make a room for another RTOS hence enhancing the features and support of currently available VM. This thesis report describes all porting steps, procedures and testing methodologies starting from configuring a new hardware platform Hexiwear to FreeRTOS porting on Zerynth V

SyzTrust: State-aware Fuzzing on Trusted OS Designed for IoT Devices

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) embedded in IoT devices provide a deployable solution to secure IoT applications at the hardware level. By design, in TEEs, the Trusted Operating System (Trusted OS) is the primary component. It enables the TEE to use security-based design techniques, such as data encryption and identity authentication. Once a Trusted OS has been exploited, the TEE can no longer ensure security. However, Trusted OSes for IoT devices have received little security analysis, which is challenging from several perspectives: (1) Trusted OSes are closed-source and have an unfavorable environment for sending test cases and collecting feedback. (2) Trusted OSes have complex data structures and require a stateful workflow, which limits existing vulnerability detection tools. To address the challenges, we present SyzTrust, the first state-aware fuzzing framework for vetting the security of resource-limited Trusted OSes. SyzTrust adopts a hardware-assisted framework to enable fuzzing Trusted OSes directly on IoT devices as well as tracking state and code coverage non-invasively. SyzTrust utilizes composite feedback to guide the fuzzer to effectively explore more states as well as to increase the code coverage. We evaluate SyzTrust on Trusted OSes from three major vendors: Samsung, Tsinglink Cloud, and Ali Cloud. These systems run on Cortex M23/33 MCUs, which provide the necessary abstraction for embedded TEEs. We discovered 70 previously unknown vulnerabilities in their Trusted OSes, receiving 10 new CVEs so far. Furthermore, compared to the baseline, SyzTrust has demonstrated significant improvements, including 66% higher code coverage, 651% higher state coverage, and 31% improved vulnerability-finding capability. We report all discovered new vulnerabilities to vendors and open source SyzTrust.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P) 2024, San Francisco, CA, US

The Propulsive Design Aspects on the World’s First Direct Drive Hybrid Airplane

The purpose of this thesis is to design a safe technology demonstrator by implementing a direct drive propulsion system for a gas-electric hybrid aircraft. This system was integrated on the Embry-Riddle Eco-Eagle for the Green Flight Challenge 2011. The aim of the system is to allow the pilot to use the electric motor as an independent power source to fly the aircraft once at cruise altitude, while having a gas engine to allow for higher power capability. The system was designed to incorporate the motor and the motor control unit provided by Flight Design and Drivetek AG alongside a Rotax 912ULS engine. The hardware is integrated such that the pilot would be able to fly the aircraft with controls similar to conventional general aviation aircraft. This thesis discusses the method of integration of the hybrid powerplant system into a Stemme S-10 and describes the various components of that system

Design and implementation of a low-power low-cost smart embedded system for remote animal monitoring

This Master’s thesis serves as the foundation for an innovative wildlife monitoring system, encompassing hardware design, firmware and software development, and offering insights into future directions. Leveraging the research group’s extensive experience in research, development, and field deployment of wildlife technology solutions, the thesis has culminated in a device with versatile capabilities suitable for a wide range of applications. A central focus of this work is on energy efficiency, prioritizing low-power operation to facilitate extended field deployments and reduce maintenance requirements. The integration of AI capabilities is a core component, enabling real-time data analysis within the embedded system. The system’s architecture is thoughtfully designed to seamlessly integrate data from diverse sources, including visual, acoustic, and environmental inputs, providing comprehensive insights into the natural world. Modularity in communication networks empowers the system to adapt to varying project requirements and network environments. The successful integration of hardware and software components enhances system performance, ensuring seamless data flow and efficient communication between different modules. The thesis underscores the importance of comprehensive testing, performance characterization, and real-world field testing for future research. In summary, this work represents a crucial step in the development of a versatile, energy-efficient, and AI-enhanced wildlife monitoring system with the potential to make substantial contributions to the field of conservation technology.Universidad de Sevilla. Máster Universitario en Microelectrónica: Diseño y Aplicaciones de Sistemas Micro/Nanométrico