CSR: Small: Leveraging Physical Side-Channels for Good

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Internet-of-things and cyber-physical systems are becoming increasingly applicable in industrialand residential environments, opening up new opportunities for smart homes, sensor networks,and smart manufacturing. While becoming progressively more capable, this class of computingdevices is typically resource-constrained with limited energy and data storage. It is thusimperative that critical applications commonly used in these devices, such as communicationand debugging, be carefully designed to have minimal energy, performance, and area overheadwhile embracing the diversity of software and hardware present within these systems. Theproject’s novelties are presenting new approaches for enabling low-power low-overheadcommunication, fingerprinting, and debugging in internet-of-things systems. The commoninsight in all the proposed solutions is, instead of imposing additional overhead for achieving aparticular functionality (e.g., communication or debugging), we leverage unintentional physicalsignals created by the system (called side-channels) to enable the desired functionalities. As aresult, we are able to propose innovative and radically different methods. The project's broadersignificance and importance is that the proposed solutions enjoy lower energy, performance,and area storage overheads since it eliminates the need for additional infrastructure on thedevice to achieve the required functionality while being applicable to a wide range of systems.The objective of this project is to set out a research agenda for developing techniques andsystems for addressing the fundamental challenges of internet-of-things systems. The key ideain this proposal is to leverage physical side-channels, unintentionally created by the targetsystem, for useful purposes. Specifically, this research aims to fulfill three major objectives: (i)we design a new method for transmitting AND receiving data using side-channels. The proposedmethod relies only on software and is extremely low overhead. (ii) We develop a new strategyfor device detection and authentication by relying only on physical side-channels as opposed toleveraging radio frequency signals which are extensively used in the state-of-the-art. (iii) Wepropose a new method for debugging Internet of Things devices by using physical side-channels.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.