Author: Swapnil More, Pooja Deshmane, Aditya Kulkarni
Abstract: The widespread deployment of embedded systems in Internet of Things (IoT), automotive, industrial control, healthcare, and consumer electronics has significantly increased the system attack surface. Unlike traditional computing systems, embedded devices often operate with limited resources, long life cycles, and minimal physical protection, making them attractive targets for cyberattacks. Software-only security mechanisms are frequently insufficient to counter advanced threats such as physical tampering, side-channel attacks, and firmware manipulation. Hardware-based security techniques provide a robust foundation for securing embedded systems by establishing trust at the lowest system level. This paper presents a comprehensive study of hardware-based security techniques for secure embedded systems. It discusses secure boot, hardware roots of trust, trusted execution environments, cryptographic accelerators, physically unclonable functions, and secure key storage. A reference secure embedded architecture is proposed and evaluated through an IoT gateway use case. The study highlights how hardware-assisted security significantly enhances system resilience against both logical and physical attacks.
Keywords: Embedded security, Hardware security, Secure boot, Root of trust, IoT security
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