Högskolan i Skövde

The rapid integration of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in autonomous building systems has enhanced operational efficiency but also introduced significant security vulnerabilities, particularly at the firmware level including tampering, rollback attacks and unauthorized code execution that compromise system integrity. The study explores the effectiveness of Secure Boot mechanisms enhanced by Trusted Platform Module (TPM) integration, in addressing threats in resource-constrained IoT environments. A mixed-methods approach, combining literature review and simulation-based experiments helps to identify design principles, attack vectors, and implementation challenges along with tested Secure Boot’s resilience against kernel signature tampering, firmware corruption, and rollback scenarios. Performance metrics like boot time, CPU usage, memory consumption, and PCR values were also recorded to assess security enforcement impact. This study demonstrates that Secure Boot effectively blocks unauthorized firmware and enforces trust chain from the bootloader to the operating system execution. TPM integration enhances security by providing cryptographic measurement and attestation capabilities. Although minor performance overheads were observed, they remained acceptable limit for IoT class devices. The simulation environment setup using open-source tools like QEMU, UEFI firmware, and a virtual TPM offers a controlled testing environment to validates Secure Boot's practical effectiveness and scalability for real world scenario. This study provides actionable practical insights for deploying Secure Boot in autonomous systems and support emerging cybersecurity best practices, standardization efforts, and future research on firmware level protection in the IoT ecosystem.