José Cecílio, Alan Oliveira, André Souto, and António Casimiro, LASIGE Integrated Researchers, published the paper “LWSEE: Lightweight Secured Software-Based Execution Environment” in the Internet of Things journal (Elsevier), a top 10% journal. Georg Jäger, from the Institute of Computer Science at TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Freiberg, Germany, co-authored the paper.

This research introduces LWSEE, which highlights the growing prevalence of the Internet of Things (IoT) in handling sensitive and critical data. Currently, hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) are used to provide data protection. However, they are not suitable for low-cost devices that lack hardware-assisted security features. To address this issue, this research proposes a Lightweight Secure Software-based Execution Environment (LWSEE) for embedded devices. LWSEE comprises a lightweight, distributed solution that protects against hardware attacks, offers a comprehensive security check mechanism, enables secure application execution, and supports secure application updates to ensure the ongoing security of IoT devices. Our experimental evaluation highlights the minimal overhead introduced by LWSEE, demonstrating its performance in terms of execution time, CPU time, and memory usage. This research demonstrates that IoT devices can remain secure without dedicated hardware, enabling the widespread adoption of IoT technology while maintaining data security.

The paper is available here.