PUF for the Commons: Enhancing Embedded Security on the OS Level
Research output: Contribution to journal › Research article › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
Security is essential for the Internet of Things (IoT). Cryptographic operations for authentication and encryption commonly rely on random input of high entropy and secure, tamper-resistant identities, which are difficult to obtain on constrained embedded devices. In this paper, we design and analyze a generic integration of physically unclonable functions (PUFs) into the IoT operating system RIOT that supports about 250 platforms. Our approach leverages uninitialized SRAM to act as the digital fingerprint for heterogeneous devices. We ground our design on an extensive study of PUF performance in the wild, which involves SRAM measurements on more than 700 IoT nodes that aged naturally in the real-world. We quantify static SRAM bias, as well as the aging effects of devices and incorporate the results in our system. This work closes a previously identified gap of missing statistically significant sample sizes for testing the unpredictability of PUFs. Our experiments on COTS devices of 64 kB SRAM indicate that secure random seeds derived from the SRAM PUF provide 256 Bits-, and device unique keys provide more than 128 Bits of security. In a practical security assessment we show that SRAM PUFs resist moderate attack scenarios, which greatly improves the security of low-end IoT devices.
Details
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 2194-2210 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing |
Volume | 21 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | Aug 2023 |
Publication status | Published - Jul 2024 |
Peer-reviewed | Yes |
External IDs
Mendeley | 20894405-a24a-3d75-9470-b89107060654 |
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Scopus | 85166768350 |
ORCID | /0000-0002-3825-2807/work/142241907 |
Keywords
Research priority areas of TU Dresden
DFG Classification of Subject Areas according to Review Boards
Subject groups, research areas, subject areas according to Destatis
Sustainable Development Goals
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- Aging, Embedded security, Entropy, Internet of Things, Operating systems, Physical unclonable function, Random access memory, Security, large -scale SRAM analysis, operating systems, physically unclonable functions, embedded security, Physically unclonable functions, large-scale SRAM analysis