Towards a unified security model for Physically Unclonable Functions

Abstract

The use of Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) in cryptographic protocols attracted an increased interest over recent years. Since sound security analysis requires a concise specification of the alleged properties of the PUF, there have been numerous trials to provide formal security models for PUFs. However, all these approaches have been tailored to specific types of applications or specific PUF instantiations. For the sake of applicability, composability, and comparability, however, there is a strong need for a unified security model for PUFs (to satisfy, for example, a need to answer whether a future protocol requirements match a new and coming PUF realization properties). In this work, we propose a PUF model which generalizes various existing PUF models and includes security properties that have not been modeled so far. We prove the relation between some of the properties, and also discuss the relation of our model to existing ones.