Security threats are a significant issue for IoT devices.
Threats can be prevented with Wi-Fi wireless microcontroller solutions

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), most devices around us are connected to the internet. Any device connected to the internet can be subject to local or remote attacks. Attackers can attack connected devices to steal corporate intellectual property stored in the system, access user data, or maliciously manipulate the system to harm users.

Security threats are a critical issue in the IoT. We have several misconceptions regarding how to address them. As evidenced by the massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that occurred late last year—which experts described as the largest in history—even seemingly harmless products, such as home digital video recorders (DVRs), can be maliciously infected and used as "botnets" to disable the operation of third-party objects. While last year's attack dealt a blow to services like Twitter and PayPal, similar attacks could target large-scale smart infrastructure technologies, such as power grid systems. According to a 2016 survey conducted by Kapersky Lab, some companies or organizations spent more than $1.6 million to resolve a single DDoS attack.

Recognizing these threats, TI’s SimpleLink™ Wi-Fi CC3220 wireless microcontroller (MCU) integrates a series of powerful, multi-layered hardware-based security features to provide a robust solution that protects products from various attacks, including local or remote packet sniffing, man-in-the-middle (MITM) server emulation, malicious privilege escalation via “over-the-air” updates, remote file manipulation, data and software theft, and intellectual property (IP) cloning.

To defend against local and remote network packet sniffing, strong encryption at the Wi-Fi (AES / WEP) and Internet (TLS / SSL) levels is required. However, these measures are insufficient to defend against malicious privilege escalation attempts or to provide comprehensive protection against the theft of IPs, code, data, keys, and identity information stored or used by connected systems. Figure 1 below shows how these measures are implemented.


Figure 1: Local network security features in operation

The CC3220 device integrates more than 25 additional security features to provide a means to defend against potential attack risks across the entire end-to-end IoT domain. These features are illustrated in Figure 2 below.


Figure 2: CC3220 Security Features

While the increasing volume of IoT system resources poses design challenges, stronger security can be achieved through MCU-based Bill of Materials (BOM) optimization systems. The first step is to identify which system resources are at risk, where potential exposure points exist, and what potential threats the system might face. Based on this understanding, a product is selected that integrates extensive hardware-based security features and reduces the burden on the host MCU.

The CC3220 wireless MCU meets exactly these requirements. Its unique dual-core architecture (Figure 3) simplifies the design by running both host applications and network processing on a single chip. Since the network processor and hardware encryption engine handle the processing of security functions, they process millions of instructions per second (MIPS), and the application MCU memory can be used entirely for processing host applications.

In addition, by physically partitioning the programmable application MCU and the ROM-based network processor, firmware and network management vulnerabilities can be reduced to defend against risks associated with the application.


Figure 3: CC3220 proprietary dual-core architecture