Quality of Security Guarantees for and with Physical Unclonable Functions and Biometric Secrecy Systems

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Unique digital circuit outputs, considered as physical unclonable function (PUF) circuit outputs, can facilitate a secure and reliable secret key agreement. To tackle noise and high correlations between the PUF circuit outputs, transform coding methods combined with scalar quantizers are typically applied to extract the uncorrelated bit sequences reliably. In this paper, we create realistic models for these transformed outputs by fitting truncated distributions to them. We also show that the state-of-the-art models are inadequate to guarantee a target reliability level for all PUF outputs, which also means that secrecy cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, we introduce a quality of security parameter to control the percentage of the PUF circuit outputs for which a target security level can be guaranteed. By applying the finite-length information theory results to a public ring oscillator output dataset, we illustrate that security guarantees can be provided for each bit extracted from any PUF device by eliminating only a small subset of PUF circuit outputs. Furthermore, we conversely show that it is not possible to provide reliability or security guarantees without eliminating any PUF circuit output. Our holistic methods and analyses can be applied to any PUF type, as well as any biometric secrecy system, with continuous-valued outputs to extract secret keys with low hardware complexity.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number1243
Number of pages15
JournalEntropy
Volume25 (2023)
Issue number8
Publication statusPublished - 21 Aug 2023
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-1702-9075/work/165878242

Keywords

Keywords

  • IoT security, physical unclonable function (PUF), quality of security (QoSec), reliability on the quantization boundary, transforms without multiplications

Library keywords