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Abstract:

The proliferation of wireless embedded devices and the boom of related applications have set design engineers the difficult task of supporting security for these emerging applications. This encompasses hiding a user's sensitive data, safeguarding his privacy and authenticating communicating parties as well as the data that is being exchanged. Implementing these security measures in an embedded context requires a multidisciplinary approach and often forces designers to make a trade-off between, processing speed, memory usage, energy, cost, etc., which are not only influenced by the security measures itself, but also by the application and the communication.In this PhD, we have developed an embedded test platform that allows design engineers to quickly implement proof-of-concept applications, evaluate them, and make educated design choices on how to implement the required security measures. As an addition to this platform we have designed a hardware accelerator for offloading the modular exponentiations required for several public-key security protocols. To keep the range of possible applications and hardware platforms as broad as possible, we have made this design highly customizable. A second topic is the study of Near-Field Communication (NFC) as a medium to communicate between a mobile device (e.g., a tablet or smartphone) and an embedded terminal (e.g., a vending machine, access control point, or ticketing terminal). We also extend the functionality of our embedded test platform by adding support for NFC.Finally, we have used our embedded platform in two case studies to validate our design and to evaluate different design approaches in a practical setup. A first case study focuses on attribute-based credential verification (a privacy-preserving technique) over NFC and evaluates the influence of communication and processing (both in hardware and software) on the application run time. A second case study evaluates the data rates and communication times of NFC compared to an approach in which NFC is used to initiate communication over a faster WiFi channel.