ASSURED: Architecture for Secure Software Update of Realistic Embedded Devices

Secure firmware update is an important stage in the Internet of Things (IoT) device life-cycle. Prior techniques, designed for other computational settings, are not readily suitable for IoT devices, since they do not consider idiosyncrasies of a realistic large-scale IoT deployment. This motivates our design of architecture for secure software update of realistic embedded devices (ASSURED), a secure and scalable update framework for IoT. ASSURED includes all stakeholders in a typical IoT update ecosystem, while providing end-to-end security between manufacturers and devices. To demonstrate its feasibility and practicality, ASSURED is instantiated and experimentally evaluated on two commodity hardware platforms. Results show that ASSURED is considerably faster than current update mechanisms in realistic settings.