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

Intermittent Computing: Challenges and Opportunities

The maturation of energy-harvesting technology and ultra-low-power computer systems has led to the advent of intermittently-powered, batteryless devices that operate entirely using energy extracted from their environment. Intermittently operating devices present a rich vein of programming languages research challenges and the purpose of this paper is to illustrate these challenges to the PL research community. To provide depth, this paper includes a survey of the hardware and software design space of intermittent computing platforms. On the foundation of these research challenges and the state of the art in intermittent hardware and software, this paper describes several future PL research directions, emphasizing a connection between intermittence, distributed computing, energy-aware programming and compilation, and approximate computing. We illustrate these connections with a discussion of our ongoing work on programming for intermittence, and on building and simulating intermittent distributed systems