Secure and Lightweight Firmware Over-the-Air Update Mechanism for Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) necessitates secure and lightweight firmware over-the-air (FOTA) update mechanisms for remote device management and timely mitigation of security vulnerabilities. This study introduces an FOTA update method to mitigate man-in-the-middle attacks in resource-constrained environments. The proposed method minimizes firmware file size and encryption overhead through a dual-XOR operation and DEFLATE compression, while enhancing security via multiple transmission channels. It improves performance in terms of latency, memory usage, and power consumption but also maintains security against brute-force attacks during MITM attacks.