A PUF-based secure wake-up scheme for Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) are typically powered by limited-capacity batteries. Thus, reducing energy consumption is a critical issue for the success of IoT. Recently, Wake-up Radios (WuRs) play a key role in minimizing the energy consumption by providing wake-up calls to IoT devices which are currently in a low-power sleep mode to conserve energy. On receiving a pre-defined pattern called a Wake-up Token (WuT) over the WuR, the IoT device wakes up in order to process information and/or conduct communications. However, WuR-based IoT devices are susceptible to malicious attacks, such as Denial-of-Sleep attacks designed to drain the device of its energy, or cloning attacks designed to impersonate a legitimate IoT device and perform various nefarious activities. To address these problems, the present study proposes a novel one-time wake-up token using the Physical Unclonable Function (PUF). In addition, to prevent the WuT from becoming desynchronized thereby resulting in a connection loss, a WuT resynchronization scheme is designed to maintain a constant state of synchronization between the WuTs of the gateway and the IoT devices, respectively. Finally, the proposed schemes are extended to support group wake-up and resynchronization procedures, respectively, in order to enhance the communication efficiency and improve the energy conservation. The correctness of the proposed schemes is verified through AUTLOG analysis. It has been shown that the proposed schemes are secure against various types of attacks and consume significantly less energy than existing mechanisms in waking up an IoT device.