A review on security implementations in soft-processors for IoT applications

Abstract

With the increase in the number of devices connected to the Internet, the need to maintain and harden information security in Internet systems has significantly increased. This has led to the development of hardware systems that implement security services. Therefore, from a taxonomy to sort and classify the key criteria to processor design, an overview and in-depth analysis of soft-processors that implement algorithms for Internet of Thing applications is presented highlighting their advantages and disadvantages to be used in larger systems. In order to perform a systematic review of the engineering literature related to the interest topic in this work, a bidirectional review methodology consisting of the following three phases has been proposed and applied: review planning, review conducting, and review reporting. Then, soft-processor architectures implementing security algorithms are compared considering computational cost, speed, bus size, number of pipeline stages, and performance. Finally, based on a feature analysis, the strengths and threats of soft-processors when implementing information security for Internet of Things applications are discussed, and the LORS design model is proposed to lead to recommendations for future designs.