Sensor networks with battery-powered nodes can seldom simultaneously meet the design goals of lifetime, cost, sensing reliability and sensing and transmission coverage. Energy-harvesting, converting ambient energy to electrical energy, has emerged as an alternative to power sensor nodes. By exploiting recharge opportunities and tuning performance parameters based on current and expected energy levels, energy harvesting sensor nodes have the potential to address the conflicting design goals of lifetime and performance. This paper surveys various aspects of energy harvesting sensor systems- architecture, energy sources and storage technologies and examples of harvesting-based nodes and applications. The study also discusses the implications of recharge opportunities on sensor node operation and design of sensor network solutions.

Energy Harvesting Sensor Nodes: Survey and Implications

The most visible use of computers and software is processing information for human consumption. The vast majority of computers in use, however, are much less visible. They run the engine, brakes, seatbelts, airbag, and audio system in your car. They digitally encode your voice and construct a radio signal to send it from your cell phone to a base station. They command robots on a factory floor, power generation in a power plant, processes in a chemical plant, and traffic lights in a city. These less visible computers are called embedded systems, and the software they run is called embedded software. The principal challenges in designing and analyzing embedded systems stem from their interaction with physical processes. This book takes a cyber-physical approach to embedded systems, introducing the engineering concepts underlying embedded systems as a technology and as a subject of study. The focus is on modeling, design, and analysis of cyber-physical systems, which integrate computation, networking, and physical processes. The second edition offers two new chapters, several new exercises, and other improvements. The book can be used as a textbook at the advanced undergraduate or introductory graduate level and as a professional reference for practicing engineers and computer scientists. Readers should have some familiarity with machine structures, computer programming, basic discrete mathematics and algorithms, and signals and systems.

Introduction to Embedded Systems - A Cyber-Physical Systems Approach

Intermittently powered applications create a need for low-cost security and privacy in potentially hostile environments, supported by primitives including identification and random number generation. Our measurements show that power-up of SRAM produces a physical fingerprint. We propose a system of fingerprint extraction and random numbers in SRAM (FERNS) that harvests static identity and randomness from existing volatile CMOS memory without requiring any dedicated circuitry. The identity results from manufacture-time physically random device threshold voltage mismatch, and the random numbers result from runtime physically random noise. We use experimental data from high-performance SRAM chips and the embedded SRAM of the WISP UHF RFID tag to validate the principles behind FERNS. For the SRAM chip, we demonstrate that 8-byte fingerprints can uniquely identify circuits among a population of 5,120 instances and extrapolate that 24-byte fingerprints would uniquely identify all instances ever produced. Using a smaller population, we demonstrate similar identifying ability from the embedded SRAM. In addition to identification, we show that SRAM fingerprints capture noise, enabling true random number generation. We demonstrate that a 512-byte SRAM fingerprint contains sufficient entropy to generate 128-bit true random numbers and that the generated numbers pass the NIST tests for runs, approximate entropy, and block frequency.

Power-Up SRAM State as an Identifying Fingerprint and Source of True Random Numbers

Internet-of-Things (IoT) are everywhere in our daily life. They are used in our homes, in hospitals, deployed outside to control and report the changes in environment, prevent fires, and many more beneficial functionality. However, all those benefits can come of huge risks of privacy loss and security issues. To secure the IoT devices, many research works have been conducted to countermeasure those problems and find a better way to eliminate those risks, or at least minimize their effects on the user’s privacy and security requirements. The survey consists of four segments. The first segment will explore the most relevant limitations of IoT devices and their solutions. The second one will present the classification of IoT attacks. The next segment will focus on the mechanisms and architectures for authentication and access control. The last segment will analyze the security issues in different layers.

A Survey on Security and Privacy Issues in Internet-of-Things

Lukasz Piwek and colleagues consider whether wearable technology can become a valuable asset for health care.

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The Rise of Consumer Health Wearables: Promises and Barriers

Our study analyzes the security and privacy properties of an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD). Introduced to the U.S. market in 2003, this model of ICD includes pacemaker technology and is designed to communicate wirelessly with a nearby external programmer in the 175 kHz frequency range. After partially reverse-engineering the ICD's communications protocol with an oscilloscope and a software radio, we implemented several software radio-based attacks that could compromise patient safety and patient privacy. Motivated by our desire to improve patient safety, and mindful of conventional trade-offs between security and power consumption for resource-constrained devices, we introduce three new zero-power defenses based on RF power harvesting. Two of these defenses are human-centric, bringing patients into the loop with respect to the security and privacy of their implantable medical devices (IMDs). Our contributions provide a scientific baseline for understanding the potential security and privacy risks of current and future IMDs, and introduce human-perceptible and zero-power mitigation techniques that address those risks. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first in our community to use general-purpose software radios to analyze and attack previously unknown radio communications protocols.

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Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses

Protecting implantable medical devices against attack without compromising patient health requires balancing security and privacy goals with traditional goals such as safety and utility. Implantable medical devices monitor and treat physiological conditions within the body. These devices - including pacemakers, implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs), drug delivery systems, and neurostimulators - can help manage a broad range of ailments, such as cardiac arrhythmia, diabetes, and Parkinson's disease. IMDs' pervasiveness continues to swell, with upward of 25 million US citizens currently reliant on them for life-critical functions. Growth is spurred by geriatric care of the aging baby-boomer generation, and new therapies continually emerge for chronic conditions ranging from pediatric type 1 diabetes to anorgasmia and other sexual dysfunctions. Moreover, the latest IMDs support delivery of telemetry for remote monitoring over long-range, high-bandwidth wireless links, and emerging devices will communicate with other interoperating IMDs.

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Security and Privacy for Implantable Medical Devices

RFID-enabled credit cards are widely deployed in the United States and other countries, but no public study has thoroughly analyzed the mechanisms that provide both security and privacy Using samples from a variety of RFID-enabled credit cards, our study observes that (1) the cardholder's name and often credit card number and expiration are leaked in plaintext to unauthenticated readers, (2) our homemade device costing around $150 effectively clones one type of skimmed cards thus providing a proof-of-concept implementation for the RF replay attack, (3) information revealed by the RFID transmission cross contaminates the security of RFID and non-RFID payment contexts, and (4) RFID-enabled credit cards are susceptible in various degrees to a range of other traditional RFID attacks such as skimming and relaying

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Vulnerabilities in first-generation RFID-enabled credit cards

We propose an application of recent advances in e-cash, anonymous credentials, and proxy re-encryption to the problem of privacy in public transit systems with electronic ticketing. We discuss some of the interesting features of transit ticketing as a problem domain, and provide an architecture sufficient for the needs of a typical metropolitan transit system. Our system maintains the security required by the transit authority and the user while significantly increasing passenger privacy. Our hybrid approach to ticketing allows use of passive RFID transponders as well as higher powered computing devices such as smartphones or PDAs. We demonstrate security and privacy features offered by our hybrid system that are unavailable in a homogeneous passive transponder architecture, and which are advantageous for users of passive as well as active devices.

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Privacy for public transportation

s ecurity and p rivacy for Implantable medical Devices Protecting implantable medical devices against attack without compromising patient health requires balancing security and privacy goals with traditional goals such as safety and utility.

Thomas S. Heydt-Benjamin

Papers

Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses

Security and Privacy for Implantable Medical Devices

Vulnerabilities in first-generation RFID-enabled credit cards

Privacy for public transportation

s ecurity and p rivacy for Implantable medical Devices Protecting implantable medical devices against attack without compromising patient health requires balancing security and privacy goals with traditional goals such as safety and utility.