Intrinsic Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) Sensors in Commodity Devices

• Main Authors: Shuai Chen, Bing Li, Yuan Cao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-05-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: physical unclonable functions; PUF sensor; DRAM PUF; key generation scheme
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/11/2428

The environment-dependent feature of physical unclonable functions (PUFs) is capable of sensing environment changes. This paper presents an analysis and categorization of a variety of PUF sensors. Prior works have demonstrated that PUFs can be used as sensors while providing a security authentication assurance. However, most of the PUF sensors need a dedicated circuit. It can be difficult to implemented in commercial off-the-shelf devices. This paper focuses on the intrinsic Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) PUF-based sensors, which requires no modifications for hardware. The preliminary experimental results on Raspberry Pi have demonstrated the feasibility of our design. Furthermore, we configured the DRAM PUF-based sensor in a DRAM PUF-based key generation scheme which improves the practicability of the design.