DESIGN OF EMBEDDED POWER SIGNATURE GENERATION CIRCUITS FOR INTERNET OF THINGS SECURITY

With the wide adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) in applications that involve sensitive information, the security of IoT devices is becoming an important concern. IoT devices face many challenges in securing information due to their low cost and computation constrains. To over come such challenges, different techniques have been developed. One such technique is power analysis. However, power analysis requires equipment that is often bulky, power hungry and expensive, making them unsuitable for many IoT applications. This thesis developed two energy signature capturing circuits that can be embedded into low dropout (LDO) voltage regulators. The first design targets analog LDO circuits and the second design is suitable for the newly emerged digital LDOs. Both circuits are designed and simulated using a commercial 130nm CMOS technology. To evaluate the effectiveness of the developed circuits, power traces collected from a wireless sensor device are used in circuit simulations. The results indicate that the developed circuits can detect different model wireless transmission as well as other abnormal operations