Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) security is one of the most important issues developers have to face. Data tampering must be prevented in IoT devices and some or all of the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of sensible data files must be assured in most practical IoT applications, especially when data are stored in removable devices such as microSD cards, which is very common. Software solutions are usually applied, but their effectiveness is limited due to the reduced resources available in IoT systems. This paper introduces a hardware-based security framework for IoT devices (Embedded LUKS) similar to the Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) solution used in Linux systems to encrypt data partitions. Embedded LUKS (E-LUKS) extends the LUKS capabilities by adding integrity and authentication methods, in addition to the confidentiality already provided by LUKS. E-LUKS uses state-of-the-art encryption and hash algorithms such as PRESENT and SPONGENT. Both are recognized as adequate solutions for IoT devices being PRESENT incorporated in the ISO/IEC 29192-2:2019 for lightweight block ciphers. E-LUKS has been implemented in modern XC7Z020 FPGA chips, resulting in a smaller hardware footprint compared to previous LUKS hardware implementations, a footprint of about a 10% of these LUKS implementations, making E-LUKS a great alternative to provide Full Disk Encryption (FDE) alongside authentication to a wide range of IoT devices.
Highlights
The Internet of Things (IoT) industry has grown steadily in the last few years
These flash memories are typically divided into blocks of 512 bytes and, to facilitate the HDL design, it has been decided that the first block of the memory contains all the E-Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) related data, while the rest of the memory is reserved for the user encrypted data
In order to validate the proposed solution, an experiment has been conducted that provides a functional verification of Embedded LUKS (E-LUKS) and execution times with and without it
Summary
The Internet of Things (IoT) industry has grown steadily in the last few years. Many facts indicate that this growth is an upward trend [1], with IoT data traffic expected to reach around 2000 petabytes of information by 2024 [2]. Block device encryption adds a new layer between the physical device and the read/write device operations This is much more resource-friendly and allows IoT applications to access encrypted memory in a transparent way. A lightweight IoT protocol based on LUKS is introduced, which provides, on top of the FDE of LUKS, both the integrity, and authenticity of the user data This protocol has been called Embedded LUKS (E-LUKS) and it has been especially tailored to allow an efficient hardware implementation, making possible the implementation of a small footprint hardware module that is able to read/write into a final storage device. A brief evaluation of the proposed solution is provided in Conclusions
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