Date of Award

6-10-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2024

Department

Computer Science and Engineering

Abstract

With a wide range of applications and the rise of cyber attacks, securing microcontrollers has become imperative; however, ensuring microcontroller performance is also crucial given how interconnected today’s systems are. This project examines the security and performance of next-generation microcontroller units leveraging new security solutions for IoT edge applications. By benchmarking these MCUs against key performance metrics, their viability will be assessed to facilitate the widespread adoption of this latest firmware.

Our research focuses on profiling the power consumption and performance of the new STM32H573 and the integrated Secure Manager, a new technology from ST Microelectronics that allows for privileged execution of code and restricting access to services. The STM32H573 supports various cryptography algorithms (like ECDSA) at the hardware level to enable this. Our work profiles the power consumption and performance of these technologies. We found that in some cases the Secure Manager is more energy efficient, and can also o↵er negligible performance overhead. With that said, for the majority of the use cases we evaluated running the application in the Non-Secure mode both increased performance and decreased energy consumption.

Download

Share

COinS