Memory Based Physical Unclonable Function And Its Application In Security And Privacy Protection

Physical Unclonable Function(PUF)is hardware-specific security primitive that provides cryptographic functionalities for electronic devices.The physical structure of PUF is considered easy to manufacture but hard or impossible to replicate due to the uncontrollable and inevitable variations in its manufacturing process.That makes it a hot research topic,especially for generating random,stable,and tamper-resistant fingerprints and secret keys.This research focuses on the memory-based PUF,SRAM-PUF in particular,and its applications in identification,security,and privacy.The main contributions of this thesis are presented as follows:1)Exploring PUF different types:A taxonomy of PUF types is presented in which PUFs are divided based on the fabrication process.In addition,the PUF types are further classified based on security and specifications.2)Improving the reliability and uniqueness of SRAM-PUF generated keys:Two algorithms are proposed to overcome the defects in the reliability and uniqueness of secret keys generated using SRAM-PUF.Hence,the reliability increases from 95.6%to more than 98%.Meanwhile,the uniqueness rises from 34.4%to 49.8%,which is close to 50%-the ideal value.Furthermore,the SRAM-PUF was tested under different environmental conditions,including temperature and magnetic field,in addition to exploring the effect of writing different values to the SRAM cells on the stability of their startup values.3)Using SRAM-PUF to improve the security and privacy of electronic devices:The SRAM-PUF generated keys are used as replacement for the traditional secret keys.In addition,they are used to protect the memory where the local device secrets are stored in,which help preserving data privacy.As a study case,SRAM-PUF is used with ZigBee devices in the experiments described in this thesis.4)SRAM-PUF in identification and authentication:A lightweight,robust SRAM-PUF based entity authentication scheme is proposed to guarantee that the accessed remote devices are trustable.The proposed scheme uses Challenge-Response Pairs(CRPs)represented by re-ordered memory addresses as challenges and the corresponding SRAM cells’ startup values as responses.