Wireless sensor node is the foundation for building the next generation of ubiquitous networks or the so-called internet of things (IoT). Each node is equipped with sensing, computing devices, and a radio transceiver. Each node is connected to other nodes via a wireless sensor network (WSN). Examples of WSN applications include health care monitoring, and industrial monitoring. These applications process sensitive data, which if disclosed, may lead to unwanted implications. Therefore, it is crucial to provide fundamental security services such as identification and authentication in WSN. Nevertheless, providing this security on WSN imposes a significant challenge as each node in WSN has a limited area and energy consumption. Therefore, in this study, we provide a proof of concept of a lightweight authentication protocol by using physical unclonable function (PUF) technology for resource-constrained wireless sensor nodes. The authentication protocol has been implemented on NodeMCU ESP8266 devices. A server-client protocol configuration has been used to verify the functionality of the authentication protocol. Our findings indicate that the protocol used approximately 7% of flash memory and 48% of static random-access memory (SRAM) in the sensor node during the authentication process. Hence, the proposed scheme is suitable to be used for resource-constrained IoT devices such as WSN.

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The internet of things (IoT) describes the network of physical objects equipped with sensors and other technologies to exchange data with other devices over the Internet. Due to its inherent flexibility, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) has become a viable platform for IoT development. However, various security threats such as FPGA bitstream cloning and intellectual property (IP) piracy have become a major concern for this device. Physical unclonable function (PUF) is a promising hardware fingerprinting technology to solve the above problems. Several PUFs have been proposed, including the implementation of reconfigurable-XOR PUF (R-XOR PUF) and multi-PUF (MPUF) on the FPGA. However, these proposed PUFs have drawbacks, such as high delay imbalances caused by routing constraints. Therefore, in this study, we explore relative placement method to implement the symmetric routing in the obfuscated delay-based PUF on the FPGA board. The delay analysis result proves that our method to implement the symmetric routing was successful. Therefore, our work has achieved good PUF quality with uniqueness of 48.75%, reliability of 99.99%, and uniformity of 52.5%. Moreover, by using the obfuscation method, which is an Arbiter-PUF combined with a random challenge permutation technique, we reduced the vulnerability of Arbiter-PUF against machine learning attacks to 44.50%.