Visible to the public An Attack Resilient PUF-based Authentication Mechanism for Distributed Systems

TitleAn Attack Resilient PUF-based Authentication Mechanism for Distributed Systems
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2022
AuthorsEbrahimabadi, Mohammad, Younis, Mohamed, Lalouani, Wassila, Karimi, Naghmeh
Conference Name2022 35th International Conference on VLSI Design and 2022 21st International Conference on Embedded Systems (VLSID)
Keywordsauthentication, composability, Embedded systems, Fingerprint recognition, Internet of Things, Metrics, Protocols, pubcrawl, Resiliency, reverse engineering, sybil attacks, Very large scale integration
AbstractIn most PUF-based authentication schemes, a central server is usually engaged to verify the response of the device's PUF to challenge bit-streams. However, the server availability may be intermittent in practice. To tackle such an issue, this paper proposes a new protocol for supporting distributed authentication while avoiding vulnerability to information leakage where CRPs could be retrieved from hacked devices and collectively used to model the PUF. The main idea is to provision for scrambling the challenge bit-stream in a way that is dependent on the verifier. The scrambling pattern varies per authentication round for each device and independently across devices. In essence, the scrambling function becomes node- and packetspecific and the response received by two verifiers of one device for the same challenge bit-stream could vary. Thus, neither the scrambling function can be reverted, nor the PUF can be modeled even by a collusive set of malicious nodes. The validation results using data of an FPGA-based implementation demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in thwarting PUF modeling attacks by collusive actors. We also discuss the approach resiliency against impersonation, Sybil, and reverse engineering attacks.
DOI10.1109/VLSID2022.2022.00032
Citation Keyebrahimabadi_attack_2022