Secure Communication with Batteryless Sensors

Batteryless sensors have recently been proposed as an energy-efficient and cost-effective alternative to battery-powered sensors. By harvesting and immediately consuming ambient energy, it becomes unnecessary to design systems with large energy storages, which significantly increases their form factor, cost, and environmental impact. Many works have focused on designing batteryless systems that sense data, process it, and wirelessly broadcast processed data. Yet wireless security aspects of batteryless applications are only now receiving attention. In this work, we propose a secure communication system based on symmetric key encryption, that enables batteryless sensors to securely broadcast data. Furthermore, we demonstrate this system on a batteryless smartcard in two application scenarios: static sensor deployment for secure data gathering, and mobile device for identification purposes. Our experimental results demonstrate not only the feasibility of secure communication with batteryless devices but also the small overheads of introducing security in wireless beaconing applications.