Secure and Lightweight Firmware Update Framework for IoT Environment

High market demands on IoT devices give rise to numerous malware attacks in IoT ecosystem. In order to protect IoT devices, device owners are required to keep their device's firmware up-to-date. However, sometimes the firmware update process could be very challenging for technology illiterate device owners. As there are risks of online adversaries to launch attacks to the IoT device during the firmware update process. In this paper, a robust and lightweight firmware update framework utilizing skipchain technology is proposed to ensure the integrity of distributed firmware and secure firmware distribution process. A prototype based on the proposed firmware update framework is developed to show the feasibility of the proposed framework design.