Secure Intermittent-Robust Computation for Energy Harvesting Device Security and Outage Resilience

In this paper, we propose Secure Intermittent-Robust Computation (SIRC) for Energy Harvesting Powered Internet of Things (IoT) Devices. This effort innovates a new duty-cycle-variable computing approach to facilitate and invigorate security in energyharvesting-powered IoT network nodes. The proposed SIRC architecture is developed from the ground up by extending emerging postCMOS switching elements to realize majority-gate logic that is intrinsically-capable of middleware-coherent, battery-free without checkpointing or micro-tasking, and can be resilient to wireless power transfer attacks including charge attacks and data attacks. Potential countermeasures for these attacks are identified at the circuit-level through gate-resolution immunity of power interruption. As a proofof-concept, a power-maskable design using SIRC approach is developed for s27 circuit from ISCAS89 benchmark. The obtained results shows SIRC provides reduced area consumption and increase number of power traces to extract crypted data. Keywords— Power transfer attack; Power failure vulnerability; Charging attack; Internet of things; Battery-free computing; Spintronics; Majority gate logic; Power Masking Unit.