SECCS: SECure Context Saving for IoT Devices

Abstract: Energy consumption of IoT devices is a very important issue. For this reason, many techniques have been developed to allow IoT nodes to be aware of the amount of available energy. When energy is missing, the device halts and saves its state. One of those techniques is context saving, relying on the use of Non-Volatile Memories (NVM) to store and restore the state of the device. However, this information, as far as IoT devices deal with security, might be the target of attacks, including tampering and theft of confidential data. In this paper, we propose a SECure Context Saving (SECCS) approach that provides a context saving procedure and a hardware module easy to implement inside a System on Chip (SoC). This approach provides both confidentiality and integrity to all the CPU content saved into the target NVM.