Towards the enhancement of AES IP security using hardware obfuscation technique: A practical approach for secure data transmission in IoT

Abstract

The global market of developing Internet of Things (IoT) devices increases rapidly with improved design goals like cost, energy efficiency, and performance. Unfortunately, the above design goals often come at the expense of security. Illegal access to the network, malicious device control, compromised sensitive information, and theft of personal data are main threats to these devices. As a result, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is sometimes employed to ensure safe transmission and processing of data in IoT Systems.However, tampering, cloning, and reverse engineering are main concerns that impair the computational complexity of the 128-bit AES at the hardware level. Recently hardware obfuscation-based AES has emerged as a comprehensive hardware security approach for reducing threat impacts. The hardware obfuscation schemes efficiently introduce obfuscation keys for AES to conceal its functionality. The Xilinx Vivado 2016.2 software and BASYS-3 FPGA have been used to implement obfuscated AES approaches in this work. The proposed methods have low resource usage in terms of area and power overhead while providing a high level of security in terms of Hamming Distance of 50% and Avalanche Effect of 40% for each obfuscation method. We have also analyzed the probability of success for brute-force attacks for proposed methodologies.