Evaluation of SRAM PUF Characteristics and Generation of Stable Bits for IoT Security

Aung, Pyi Phyo; Mashiko, Kunihiro; Ismail, Nordinah; Yee, Ooi Chia

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-33582-3_42

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Taniguchi et al proposes the new soft-decision fuzzy extractor to solve instability caused by power fluctuation [ 51 ]. Aung et al obtained stable bits using the Data Remanence algorithm on the SRAM PUF [ 50 ].…”

Section: Physically Unclonable Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

P/Key: PUF based second factor authentication

Uysal

Akgün

2023

PLoS ONE

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One-time password (OTP) mechanisms are widely used to strengthen authentication processes. In time-based one-time password (TOTP) mechanisms, the client and server store common secrets. However, once the server is compromised, the client’s secrets are easy to obtain. To solve this issue, hash-chain-based second-factor authentication protocols have been proposed. However, these protocols suffer from latency in the generation of OTPs on the client side because of the hash-chain traversal. Secondly, they can generate only a limited number of OTPs as it depends on the length of the hash-chain. In this paper, we propose a second-factor authentication protocol that utilizes Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) to overcome these problems. In the proposed protocol, PUFs are used to store the secrets of the clients securely on the server. In case of server compromise, the attacker cannot obtain the seeds of clients’ secrets and can not generate valid OTPs to impersonate the clients. In the case of physical attacks, including side-channel attacks on the server side, our protocol has a mechanism that prevents attackers from learning the secrets of a client interacting with the server. Furthermore, our protocol does not incur any client-side delay in OTP generation.

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Section: Physically Unclonable Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

P/Key: PUF based second factor authentication

Uysal

Akgün

2023

PLoS ONE

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“…Different types of PUFs have different ways of obtaining CRPs. As for the SRAM PUF, challenge C can simply be the memory address and the bit location of the addressed word, and the response R is the start-up binary value of that particular bit [40]. For instance as shown in Figure 1, if a given challenge C is {0111 0010, 0100} where 0111 0010 is the memory address while 0100 is the bit location (bit 4 from least-significant bit), response R = f(0111 0010,0100) = 1.…”

Section: Terminology and Performance Metricsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Data Remanence Based Approach towards Stable Key Generation from Physically Unclonable Function Response of Embedded SRAMs using Binary Search

Pyi Phyo Aung,

Nordinah Ismail,

Chia Yee Ooi

et al. 2023

ARASET

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Today’s device authentications in IoT devices use public and private key cryptography. Nevertheless, they are still vulnerable to threats because keys or device IDs digitally stored in IoT devices can be stolen or cloned. In contrast, SRAM PUFs utilize physical variations in memory cells of embedded SRAM in microcontrollers or standalone SRAM chips. These inherent physical characteristics are unpredictable and practically impossible to duplicate. They are negligible to affect regular SRAM operation but large enough to be used for authentication purposes in SRAM PUFs operation. However, SRAM PUFs have poor stability and a relatively high bit error rate (BER). Temporal Majority Voting (TMV) and other error correction codes (ECCs) have improved SRAM PUFs performance, but they require a lot of processing time and hardware resources. The data remanence nature of SRAM cells can be utilized to select SRAM PUFs bits with much lower BER and more stable bits, but a suitable algorithm is required to find the best possible power-off time for each type of chip. This paper proposes using the data remanence method and binary search algorithm to obtain the strong SRAM PUFs characteristics of the selected SRAMs at the optimal power-off time. These SRAMs include embedded SRAMs of AtMega328P, STM32F108C, ESP8266 microcontrollers, and an off-the-shelf SRAM chip 23LC1024-I/P, which are being used in various IoT applications. The strong SRAM PUF has more stable characteristics that reduce BER to 0% and increase stability to 99.999%. This proposed method can be utilized on any IoT platform which deals with essential data and requires less resource-hungry security and authentication protocols.

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“…These studies show that the inherent SRAM in ARM-based microcontroller contains sufficient entropy to be exploited as PUF. In other studies, Platonov et al, [15] and Aung et al, [16] investigate the entropy of SUVs in an on-chip memory in ATMega1284P and ATMega328P microcontrollers, respectively. The results from both studies show that the SUVs have a good entropy that can uniquely distinguish each chip.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lightweight hardware fingerprinting solution using inherent memory in off-the-shelf commodity devices

Mispan

Jidin

Kamarudin

et al. 2022

IJEECS

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An emerging technology known as Physical unclonable function (PUF) can provide a hardware root-of-trust in building the trusted computing system. PUF exploits the intrinsic process variations during the integrated circuit (IC) fabrication to generate a unique response. This unique response differs from one PUF to the other similar type of PUFs. Static random-access memory PUF (SRAM-PUF) is one of the memory-based PUFs in which the response is generated during the memory power-up process. Non-volatile memory (NVM) architecture like SRAM is available in off-the-shelf microcontroller devices. Exploiting the inherent SRAM as PUF could wide-spread the adoption of PUF. Therefore, in this study, we evaluate the suitability of inherent SRAM available in ATMega2560 microcontroller on Arduino platform as PUF that can provide a unique fingerprint. First, we analyze the start-up values (SUVs) of memory cells and select only the cells that show random values after the power-up process. Subsequently, we statistically analyze the characteristic of fifteen SRAM-PUFs which include uniqueness, reliability, and uniformity. Based on our findings, the SUVs of fifteen on-chip SRAMs achieve 42.64% uniqueness, 97.28% reliability, and 69.16% uniformity. Therefore, we concluded that the available SRAM in off-the-shelf commodity hardware has good quality to be used as PUF.

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Evaluation of SRAM PUF Characteristics and Generation of Stable Bits for IoT Security

Cited by 7 publications

References 12 publications

P/Key: PUF based second factor authentication

P/Key: PUF based second factor authentication

Data Remanence Based Approach towards Stable Key Generation from Physically Unclonable Function Response of Embedded SRAMs using Binary Search

Lightweight hardware fingerprinting solution using inherent memory in off-the-shelf commodity devices

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