A Hardware-based Framework for Secure Firmware Updates on Embedded Systems

The ability to update firmware in embedded systems allows end-users to patch device vulnerabilities and improve functionality. However, this process is often exploited by adversaries in order to inject malicious firmware code into embedded devices. In this paper, we present a framework which enables highly secure and fast firmware update delivery with minimal downtime on embedded devices. The proposed framework utilizes device intrinsic physical characteristics to authenticate firmware packages along with integrated cryptographic modules to ensure the firmware confidentiality and integrity. A proof-of-concept design is implemented on FPGA, which demonstrates high performance with reasonable overheads, while our analysis shows strong security guarantees.© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. S. Falas, C. Konstantinou and M. K. Michael, "A Hardware-based Framework for Secure Firmware Updates on Embedded Systems," 2019 IFIP/IEEE 27th International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI-SoC), Cuzco, Peru, 2019, pp. 198-203. doi: 10.1109/VLSI-SoC.2019.892034