While embedded devices play an increasingly significant role in the functional interoperability and coordination of various IoT systems, they are often developed without security in mind. The premise of this research is that effective security solutions can benefit from assistance by a trustworthy hardware root of trust. This research involves approaches that utilize device intrinsic (non-)silicon-based physical/hardware characteristics to verify, authenticate, and trust IoT devices. The goal is for such methods is to support and improve detection of security breaches in the device, network, or/and system level within critical information infrastructures. This can be achieved by leveraging the acquired hardware-level values in order to verify the integrity of each layer in a single device as well the integrity of the process variables within a control operation.