Pervasive networks have led to widespread use of embedded systems, like, cell phones, PDAs, RFIDs etc, in increasingly diverse applications. Many of these embedded system applications handle sensitive data (e.g., credit Card information on a mobile phone/PDA) or perform critical functions (e.g., medical Devices or automotive electronics), and the use of security protocols is imperative to maintain confidentiality, integrity and authentication of these applications. Typically embedded systems have low computing power and finite energy supply based on a battery, and these factors are at odds with the computationally intensive nature of security protocols. In addition, embedded systems are vulnerable to many types of side-channel attacks which exploit their implementation characteristics. Thus, design of secure embedded systems is driven by three factors: good performance, low energy consumption (and, thus, longer battery life), and robustness against side-channel attacks.

I will enumerate my work on tackling these three issues in design of secure embedded systems. The focus of this talk will be on robustness and energy consumption. I will talk about a satisfiability-based framework for enabling side-channel attacks on cryptographic software running on an embedded processor. This side-channel framework helps us identify the variables whose leakage leads to the disclosure of secret keys used by the cryptographic algorithm. Next, I will explain some novel ways of optimizing energy consumption of security protocols executing on an embedded device. I will discuss the energy consumption characteristics of different cryptographic algorithms, and the manner in which this information can be used to adapt the operation of security protocols to save energy. This will be demonstrated using the widely employed secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol.

Nachiketh Potlapally is a PhD candidate in the department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. He is interested in applied cryptography, and his research includes developing security protocols, investigating hardware-software architectures for efficient security processing, and side-channel attacks. Before coming to Princeton, he worked as a research assistant at NEC labs America where he was involved in the development of NEC's register transfer level power estimation tool.