Security in Energy Harvesting Networks: A Survey of Current Solutions and Research Challenges
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Energy Harvesting (EH) technologies exploiting solar, mechanical, thermoelectric, and electromagnetic sources have recently gained renewed momentum. Thanks to the increased hardware miniaturization capabilities EH technologies nowadays represent a sustainable, manageable, and relatively low-cost alternative to batteries. Thus, EH technologies are specifically suitable for the deployment of massive Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Despite the provided glaring advantages, the integration of EH capabilities into embedded devices has further exasperated the vested energy budget issue. Indeed, the intermittent availability of the energy source and the limitations in the overall available power supply has led to challenging system trade-offs, resulting in an increased attack surface, and a general relaxation of the available security services. In this paper, we survey the security issues, applications, techniques, and challenges arising in wireless networks powered via EH technologies. In detail, rooted in a real-world analysis of the system trade-offs characterizing EH devices, we explore the vulnerabilities of EH networks, and we provide a comprehensive overview of the scientific literature, including attack vectors, physical-layer security schemes for data secrecy, cryptography techniques, and additional physical-layer countermeasures. For each of the identified macro-areas, we compare the scientific contributions across a range of shared features, indicating the pros and cons of the described techniques, the research challenges, and a few future directions. Finally, we provide an overview of the emerging topics in the area, that could trigger the interest of industry and academia, unleashing the full potential of pervasive EH wireless networks.
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