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Energy Attacks in the Battery-less Internet of Things: Directions for the Future

Published: 22 April 2024 Publication History

Abstract

We study how ambient energy harvesting may be used as an attack vector in the battery-less Internet of Things (IoT). Battery-less IoT devices rely on ambient energy harvesting and are employed in a multitude of applications, including safety-critical ones such as biomedical implants. Due to scarce energy intakes and limited energy buffers, their executions become intermittent, alternating periods of active operation with periods of recharging energy buffers. We reveal how, by exerting limited control on ambient energy one can create situations of livelock, denial of service, and starvation, without physical device access. We call these situations energy attacks. We detail, analyze, and quantitatively demonstrate how these attacks can be applied to battery-less IoT devices, and illustrate their consequences on a system's regular operation.

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  • (2024)Security and Privacy for Fat Intra-Body Communication: Mechanisms and Protocol Stack2024 IEEE 49th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)10.1109/LCN60385.2024.10639677(1-9)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
  • (2024)RPL-based attack detection approaches in IoT networks: review and taxonomyArtificial Intelligence Review10.1007/s10462-024-10907-y57:9Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024

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cover image ACM Conferences
EuroSec '24: Proceedings of the 17th European Workshop on Systems Security
April 2024
60 pages
ISBN:9798400705427
DOI:10.1145/3642974
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives International 4.0 License.

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  • (2024)Security and Privacy for Fat Intra-Body Communication: Mechanisms and Protocol Stack2024 IEEE 49th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)10.1109/LCN60385.2024.10639677(1-9)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
  • (2024)RPL-based attack detection approaches in IoT networks: review and taxonomyArtificial Intelligence Review10.1007/s10462-024-10907-y57:9Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024

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