Hardware-Based Security and Trust For IoT and Supply Chain Authentication

Abstract

New hardware architectures for Internet-of-Things (IoT) are emerging rapidly in response to con- sumer demands for improved situational awareness, instant access to widely distributed sources of news and information and remote, hand-held control over their personal assets. The most impor- tant component of IoT relates to authentication, i.e., confirming the identities of communicating entities, but weak ’password’ forms of authentication continue to dominate the IoT landscape. This presentation discusses the challenges associated with authentication in IoT environments and emerging hardware-based solutions based on physical unclonable functions (PUFs). PUFs are capable of generating unique identifiers for each chip by leveraging small performance differ- ences introduced by manufacturing process variations. PUFs are particularly attractive for IoT because they are lightweight, eliminate the need for secure non-volatile memory, and for a special class of so-called strong PUFs, are able to generate virtually an unlimited number of unique, reproducible bitstrings. I will described recent results and carry out a hardware demonstration of a Hardware-Embedded delay PUF called HELP using a set Xilinx SoC chips.