Towards Robust Low Cost Authentication for Pervasive Devices

Abstract

Low cost devices such as RFIDs, sensor network nodes, and smartcards are crucial for building the next generation pervasive and ubiquitous networks. The inherent power and footprint limitations of such networks, prevent us from employing standard cryptographic techniques for authentication which were originally designed to secure high end systems with abundant power. Furthermore, the sharp increase in the number, diversity and strength of physical attacks which directly target the implementation may have devastating consequences in a network setting creating a single point of failure. A compromised node may leak a master key, or may give the attacker an opportunity for injecting faulty messages. In this paper we present a lightweight challenge response authentication scheme based on noisy physical unclonable functions (PUF) that allows for extremely efficient implementations. Furthermore, the inherent properties of PUFs provide cryptographically strong tamper resilience. In a network setting this means that a tampered device will no longer authenticate and in a sense will be isolated from the network.

A Survey on Lightweight Entity Authentication with Strong PUFs

“…Challenge c is then used as seed value: r ← SPUF (PRNG(c)). In [44], a repeated permutation is employed for the same purpose. One might also be able to reuse cryptographic primitives, e.g., in [29], a challenge with an additional counter input is repeatedly hashed.…”

“…We consider the following list of strong PUF protocols, all described with a unified notation for ease of understanding: basic strong PUF authentication [45], controlled PUFs [15], Bolotnyy et al [4],Öztürk et al [44], Hammouri et al [18], Kulseng et al [33], Sadeghi et al [53], logically reconfigurable PUFs [29], reverse fuzzy extractors [59], the converse protocol [30], Lee et al I [35], Jin et al [23], slender PUFs [40], Xu et al [60], He et al [19], Jung et al [24], Lee et al II [36], noise bifurcation [61] and system of PUFs [31].…”

Slender PUF Protocol: A Lightweight, Robust, and Secure Authentication by Substring Matching

“…For the attack to be successful, the models should be able to correctly predict the PUF response to any new challenge with a high probability. Previous work on PUF modeling (reverse-engineering) used various machine learning techniques to attack both implementation and simulations of a number of different PUF families, including the realizations and simulations of linear arbiter PUFs and feed-forward arbiter PUFs [6], [10]- [13].…”

“…Such a model can be built by training a compact parametric model of the PUF on a set of direct challenge responses pairs. As long as the PUF challenge response pairs are obtained from the linear PUF, right after the arbiter, building and training such a compact model is possible with a relatively small set of CRPs as demonstrated in the previous literature [6], [10]- [13]. The physical access to the measurement points should be then permanently disabled before deployment, e.g., by burning irreversible fuses, so other entities cannot build the same models.…”

PUF-based secure test wrapper design for cryptographic SoC testing

“…PUFs can be used as secure key storage [2], [3] and in authentication protocols [4], [5]. A stimulus applied to a PUF is called challenge C, and the reaction of the PUF is called response R. The response depends on both the challenge and the unique intrinsic randomness of the device.…”