Extensive Examination of XOR Arbiter PUFs as Security Primitives for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

Khalid T. Mursi, Yu Zhuang, Mohammed Saeed Alkatheiri, Ahmad O. Aseeri

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

23 Scopus citations

Abstract

Communication security is essential for the proper functioning of the Internet of Things. Traditional approaches that rely on cryptographic keys are vulnerable to side-channel attacks. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), leveraging unavoidable and irreproducible variations of integrated circuits to produce responses unique for individual PUF devices, are emerging as promising candidates as security primitives to provide keyless solutions. Before a PUF can be adopted for real applications, the PUF must be thoroughly examined to understand its various properties for its application feasibility. In this paper, we study XOR PUFs for broad ranges of values for circuit architecture parameters. XOR PUFs have been extensively studied, and have been shown to be unable to withstand machine learning attacks for 64-bit XOR PUFs with less than ten component PUFs. Attack methods employed in existing studies need a large number of challenge-response pairs (CRPs), which are obtainable only if the PUF has an open access interface. When PUF-embedded devices equipped with mutual authentication or response obfuscating techniques, it is difficult for attackers to accumulate large numbers of CRPs. With only a small number of accumulated CRPs available to attackers, small size PUFs, like XOR PUFs with a small number of component PUFs and stages, may become resistant to machine learning attacks. Since smaller sizes mean less resource-demanding, it is worthwhile to examine such PUFs which have usually been considered unsafe against attacks. Such are thoughts that have been motivating us in this paper to explore the PUF performances for a wide range of values of the PUF architecture parameters.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2019 17th International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust, PST 2019 - Proceedings
EditorsAli Ghorbani, Indrakshi Ray, Arash Habibi Lashkari, Jie Zhang, Rongxing Lu
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781728132655
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2019
Event17th International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust, PST 2019 - Fredericton, Canada
Duration: Aug 26 2019Aug 28 2019

Publication series

Name2019 17th International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust, PST 2019 - Proceedings

Conference

Conference17th International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust, PST 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityFredericton
Period08/26/1908/28/19

Keywords

  • FPGA
  • IoT
  • Machine Learning attack
  • Security
  • XOR Arbiter PUF

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