SPI Based Secure Communication Framework for Industrial IoT

Abstract

The rapid growth and development of IoT has led to the need for safe and effective hardware based communication protocols. As any other network system, IoT systems are also prone to security breaches. To ensure data integrity and authentication, this paper proposes a novel design of a secure FPGA-based communication protocol-SPI on Xilinx Spartan-7 XC7S50-CSGA324 FPGA for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. The design involves design of a high-level synthesized (HLS) Intellectual Property (IP) of two security standards- Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) for encryption and decryption of the data. Following this, the serial interface is designed wherein the slave (sensor) transmits the encrypted data to the master (IoT Gateway). The decryption IP block then reveals the original message. The synthesis results show that the security protocols can achieve resource consumption as low as 3.79%. These security protocols have been also tested on Zybo, Pynq Z2 and Arty A7 boards. Additionally, these are also tested against various statistical strength measuring tests- NIST p-value and avalanche. The proposed secure design protocol is a stepping stone for next generation simple yet flexible secure IoT modules. The detailed experimental analysis also serves as a testimony to the fact that a highly secure protocol can be designed without requiring heavy resource usage or power overhead.