The devices act as dynamic, non-volatile memory to store measurements that can be retreived later, thereby enabling a battery-free datalogger. Long-term remote sensing is self-powered by omnipresent thermal and quantum fluctuations with activation energies in the attoWatt range.
For low-resource Internet-of-Things (IoTs) such as wearables, health-monitors, tags, and sensors, existing authentication techniques (using encryption, strong hash functions, and pseudorandom number generators) may prove impractical for securing access to critical data. This is because these IoT platforms have limited computational bandwidth; limited availability of energy; and require real-time authentication. Static identifiers like barcodes, product IDs, embedded physical unclonable functions (PUFs) or stored private keys are vulnerable to theft, counterfeiting, replay attacks, or tampering. Free Dynamics’s solution uses a proprietary hardware-software approach that can provide previously unattainable security levels for low-resource IoTs. Free Dynamics’s solution uses zero-power timers to generate dynamic tokens that are secure against any power side-channel attacks, eavesdropping and tampering. The hardware-software solution also supports mutual authentication, whereby the IoT device can also query and verify the trust of its reader and subsequent software upgrade transactions.