## 1 Introduction  
According to IoT Analytics [1], the number of connected IoT devices by 2027 will amount to around 29 billion, and 80% of the market is shaped by three main technologies: WiFi, Bluetooth, and Cellular technology. The fast, wireless communication gives a strong foundation to the development of \"smart\" industry, cities, homes, health monitoring, autonomous vehicles, or Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). WSNs are widely used to monitor physical conditions, such as temperature, humidity, or pollution levels, in cities and agriculture, or for predictive maintenance in industry, by measuring vibrations or noise during machine operation. Some of their applications expose the communicating devices to unauthorized physical access. In conjunction with the constraint of very limited resources, the rapid growth of the market, and the ever-growing pressure on low prices and high performance, this exposure can lead to dangerous security negligence. In the past few years, there have been notable disclosures of microarchitectural vulnerabilities even in high-end processors--Spectre [2] and Meltdown [3]--which should only sensitize us towards the subject of hardware security. While those vulnerabilities affected mostly processors used in consumer PCs, the most recently published attack--BUSted [4]--concerned the biggest manufacturer of embedded processors, which constitute the majority of \"things\" in the IoT world. Security is an important aspect and concern in the World Wide Web, and the same applies to the Internet of Things. Information security and data integrity can be achieved through the use of cryptography. There are two main approaches in cryptography: symmetric and asymmetric; the last one is also known as public-key cryptography. In symmetric cryptography, the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt information; therefore, the security depends on keeping the common key secret, as well as on its length. The standardized symmetric approach--the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) based on the Rijndael block cipher [5]--was published in 2001 [6] by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the USA. In public-key cryptography, the encryption and decryption happen using a pair of keys. The public key can be openly distributed and used to encrypt information, which can only be decrypted by a corresponding private key. Keeping the private key secret is the priority. The first standardized public-key cryptosystem was the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) cryptosystem, patented by the cryptographers [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] in 1977 [7] and published in 1978 [8]. The next standardized public-key cryptosystem--the Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC)--was proposed independently by two cryptographers: by [PERSON], in 1985, as a journal paper that was published in 1987 [9], and by [PERSON], presented in 1985 at a conference and published in 1986 in the conference proceedings [10]. Modern cryptosystems usually use a hybrid approach and leverage public-key cryptography to establish a secure communication channel and agree on a common symmetric key, i.e., the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol ECDH (recommended in standard ISO-11770-3) in combination with the AES symmetric key cipher. For example, the Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES) was proposed in 2001 by [PERSON] [11] with the goal of accelerating the encryption and decryption significantly. But, public-key cryptography is also commonly used to guarantee information integrity through the usage of Digital Signature Algorithms (DSAs), wherein the (encrypted) information digest is signed by a sender using their private key and the authenticity of the sender and integrity of the information can be tested by anyone using the public key of the sender. One such algorithm is the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) [12]. It was suggested in a response to NIST's (National Institute of Standards and Technology) request for public comments on their proposal for Digital Signature Standards.