Spatial Reconfigurable Physical Unclonable Functions for the Internet of Things

Physical Unclonable Functions in the Internet of Things: State of the Art and Open Challenges

“…Since computational resources are scarce in IoT devices, this approach may not fit properly. Recently, an approach using a spatial reconfigurable PUF [7] has been introduced as a solution to increase the number of CRPs without increasing the size of the PUF circuit on the chip. Note that we can combine strong PUFs with encrypting CRPs for additional protection.…”

“…RO PUFs are strong PUFs (Criterion 3), and the main reason behind using them for FPGA-based IoTs is their easy implementation on FPGA (Criterion 4). They have good statistical properties (Criterion 2) [7,17]. One of the drawbacks of RO PUFs is sensitivity to environmental conditions.…”

“…It is also possible to implement SRAM PUFs on micro-controllers [54,55,56], but implementing them on FPGAs is not straightforward (Criterion 4). This makes them an unpopular choice for FPGA-based PUFs for the IoT [7,17,57]. An SRAM PUF is a weak PUF (Criterion 3) with a limited number of CRPs.…”

“…It is not clear what should happen if we run out of CRPs while the device is still used. Techniques to increase the number of CRPs for small PUFs like [7] are able to mitigate this challenge, but will not solve them completely.…”

“…Security is one of the main current challenges for the Internet of Things (IoT) [1,2,3] as it begins to materialize in our personal life and future industrial systems (Industry 4.0) [4]. IoT devices must face several tough challenges, such as low energy consumption, lack of computational resources [5,6], as well as the need to secure devices against cyber-attacks [7]. Unfortunately, energy footprint concerns, as well as the scarcity of computational resources restrict which cryptographic methods can be implemented on these devices.…”