Lightweight Security Architecture Based on Embedded Virtualization and Trust Mechanisms for IoT Edge Devices

Abstract

Security issues represent the greatest obstacle to the growth of edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT). In this paradigm, IoT applications are migrating to edge devices. As a result, potential security risks are arising, and unauthorized access to data from IoT edge devices is becoming a real concern. Thus, there is a need for a comprehensive, end-toend security approach since the system's more vulnerable point determines its overall security level. An edge device security system has to be built with a root of trust (i.e., something that is unclonable) and a chain of trust. Additionally, a security layer is necessary to ensure that different IoT applications execute isolated from each other in the device. In this sense, this article defines a security architecture that integrates trust mechanisms with embedded virtualization, providing security from hardware to applications. Our experiments show that the proposed architecture can be implemented with a smaller overhead and memory footprint compared to other proposed approaches in the literature, which makes it highly suitable for resource-constrained edge devices.