Securing Communication Devices via Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs)

Abstract

In recent years, it has been more than obvious that electronic hardware devices are more than pervasive parts, in most aspects of everyday life. Although, the increased need for communications and transactions, makes both security and privacy manners a crucial factor, that has to be considered with high attention. New methodologies and approaches are developed, in order the need for high security levels, to be satisfied successfully.

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have attracted the interest of the research community the last years. PUFs basically support cryptographic primitives, in order to implement security schemes, such as key generation and storage, authentication, as well as identification.

This work carries out operation aspects of PUFs, as well as use cases, which are currently investigated by the researchers. In this paper, design approaches of PUFs are introduced, with detailed aspects of their behaviour. The security properties of the presented designs are given in detail, in order to demonstrate the security properties, introduced by the physical properties, in the most sufficient way. Comparisons of the alternative philosophies of the different designs are given.