Energy-Efficient Persistently Secure Block-Based Differential Checkpointing for Energy Harvesting Devices

Energy harvesting devices (EHDs) are increasingly adopted because of their ultra-low-power, highly portable, self-sustainable nature. However, it is challenging to use these devices as they suffer from frequent power failures due to intermit-tent and low ambient energy. While checkpointing mechanisms can resume the interrupted programs, the checkpint saved on nonvolatile memory suffer from a security vulnerability where the data remains even after the system is powered down. An attacker with physical access to the system can extract sensitive information from the memory; our goal is to find an efficient way to protect the EHDs from such vulnerabilities. We propose a secure mechanism that encrypts the checkpoints to protect EHDs against attacks such as snooping, splicing, and replay. To reduce the checkpointing overhead, we propose block-based differential checkpointing. In addition, our mechanism adaptively initiates encryption and checkpointing process based on voltage levels. We show a 27.81x improvement in the progress of the program and a 94% reduction in latency compared to the baseline method.