International Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyAuthors: Dr .D. Kumutha, Punith Raj R, Chinmayi TS, P. Sai Sushant, Ritesh Majjagi
Abstract: More and more IoT devices are turning up in factories, hospitals, homes and important systems. This raises serious security concerns for the hardware inside them. Things like firmware changes or malware can hit right at startup and that causes real trouble. Traditional software protections do not cover the early startup stage all that well. The idea here is to use a hardware root of trust to build a safer boot process for these embedded systems. Trust starts from something that cannot be changed in hardware and then moves up to the main firmware. It seems this chain helps prevent unauthorised access and rollback issues before they get underway. Cryptographic checks using SHA-256 and ECDSA help verify that the code is intact and comes from the right source. They built it around STM32 microcontrollers with a fairly light bootloader that fits limited hardware. I think this keeps things practical for smaller devices. Tests showed better resistance to tampering and more reliable checks overall. Protection against attacks improved in the results but there could be other angles to consider in real deployments.
