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Physical Security Primitives

A Survey on Physically Unclonable Functions and PUF-Based Security Solutions

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Secure Smart Embedded Devices, Platforms and Applications

Abstract

Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are an emerging technology and have been proposed as central building blocks in a variety of cryptographic protocols and security architectures. Among others, PUFs enable unique device identification and authentication, binding software to hardware platforms and secure storage of cryptographic secrets. Furthermore, they can be directly integrated into cryptographic algorithms and remote attestation protocols. In this chapter, we give an overview of the concept, properties, and types of intrinsic electronic PUFs, discuss potential attack surfaces and advanced PUF concepts as well as the most common applications of electronic PUFs. Further, we show new directions on logically reconfigurable PUFs (LR-PUFs) and PUF-based remote attestation and discuss open challenges.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The fractional Hamming weight is the number of bits in a bitstring that are ‘1’ divided by the length of the bitstring.

  2. 2.

    The fractional Hamming distance is the number of bits that are different in two bitstrings divided by the length of the bitstrings.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported in part by the European Commission under grant agreement ICT-2007-238811 UNIQUE.

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Sadeghi, AR., Schulz, S., Wachsmann, C. (2014). Physical Security Primitives. In: Markantonakis, K., Mayes, K. (eds) Secure Smart Embedded Devices, Platforms and Applications. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7915-4_19

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