Benchmarking and Configuring Security Levels in Intermittent Computing

Abstract

Intermittent computing derives its name from the intermittent character of the power source used to drive the computing, typically an energy harvester of ambient energy sources. Intermittent computing is characterized by frequent transitions between the powered and the non-powered state. To enable the processor to quickly recover from unexpected power loss, regular checkpoints store the run-time state of the program, including variables, control information, and machine state. In sensitive applications such as logged measurements, checkpoints must be secured against tamper and replay. We investigate the overhead of creating, securing, and restoring checkpoints with respect to the application. We propose a configurable checkpoint security setting that leverages application properties to reduce overhead of checkpoint security and implement the same using a secure checkpointing protocol. We discuss a prototype implementation for a FRAM-based micro-controller, and we characterize the cost of adding and configuring security to traditional checkpointing using a suite of embedded benchmark applications.