  Recent technological advancements have enabled proliferated use of small
embedded and IoT devices for collecting, processing, and transferring the
security-critical information and user data. This exponential use has acted as
a catalyst in the recent growth of sophisticated attacks such as the replay,
man-in-the-middle, and malicious code modification to slink, leak, tweak or
exploit the security-critical information in malevolent activities. Therefore,
secure communication and software state assurance (at run-time and boot-time)
of the device has emerged as open security problems. Furthermore, these devices
need to have an appropriate recovery mechanism to bring them back to the
known-good operational state. Previous researchers have demonstrated
independent methods for attack detection and safeguard. However, the majority
of them lack in providing onboard system recovery and secure communication
techniques. To bridge this gap, this manuscript proposes SRACARE- a framework
that utilizes the custom lightweight, secure communication protocol that
performs remote/local attestation, and secure boot with an onboard resilience
recovery mechanism to protect the devices from the above-mentioned attacks. The
prototype employs an efficient lightweight, low-power 32-bit RISC-V processor,
secure communication protocol, code authentication, and resilience engine
running on the Artix 7 Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) board. This work
presents the performance evaluation and state-of-the-art comparison results,
which shows promising resilience to attacks and demonstrate the novel
protection mechanism with onboard recovery. The framework achieves these with
only 8 % performance overhead and a very small increase in hardware-software
footprint.
