Securing the Internet of Things (IoT)

A market study of cybersecurity of the Internet of Things (IoT) in Phase I of this effort shows that the rapidly escalating weaponization of IoT devices will continue to be a problem for complex technical, economic, and political reasons. The IoT phenomenon has yielded a vulnerability with asymmetric cost-benefit in favor of the adversary, and this in turn has created the potential for strategic surprise to the USAF and DoD. The military response must include enhancing the security and resilience of its systems of systems, not only in the core but also in the device edge. In particular, the study shows that there is a pressing gap in technologies to secure edge devices, especially the lower end ones. These devices must not only be trustworthy but must also abandon the magical Maginot Line assumption and instead provide verifiability and recoverability in the face of device compromise. In addition, support for securing legacy apps on edge devices has become a practical necessity. Phase II proposes to leverage the advances security and reconfigurability capabilities of the emerging class of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) system-on-chip (SoC) to realize low-cost, low-power FPGA-SoC based security Intellectual property core that is suitable can be customized.