Hardware secured, password-based authentication for smart sensors for the industrial internet of things

Abstract

Sensors are a vital component for the Internet of Things. These sensors gather information about their environment and pass this information to control algorithms and/or actuators. To operate as effective as possible the sensors need to be reconfigurable, which allows the operators to optimize the sensing activities. In this work we focus on the mechanisms of such reconfiguration possibilities. As the reconfiguration can also be used to manipulate the sensors (and their attached systems) in a subtle way, the security of the reconfiguration interface is of utmost importance. Within this work we test a lightweight authentication method for use on a smart sensor and describe a possible implementations of the authentication mechanism on a hardware security module.