Embedded Systems Authentication and Encryption Using Strong PUF Modeling
Shahed Enamul Quadir, John A. Chandy · 2020
Consumer electronics and embedded systems must ensure trusted authentication and secure communications. Communication session encryption keys are negotiated in a key agreement protocol enabled by a public key/private key pair for authentication. However, embedded systems are limited in their capability to implement public key encryption and client-side authentication. In this paper, we introduce an authentication and session key generation mechanism using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) that extracts randomness from device physical characteristics. The method uses PUF models to help with key exchange and creates periodically refreshable. The approach mitigates tampering attacks as no key is stored on device.