Lightweight anti-counterfeiting solution for low-end commodity hardware using inherent PUFs

Abstract

This paper presents a lightweight anti-counterfeiting solution using intrinsic Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), which are already embedded in most commodity hardware platforms. The presented solution is particularly suitable for low-end computing devices without on-board security features. Our anti-counterfeiting approach is based on extracting a unique fingerprint for individual devices exploiting inherent PUF characteristics from the on-chip static random-access memory (SRAM), which in turn allows to bind software to a particular hardware platform. Our solution does not require additional hardware, making it flexible as well as cost efficient. In a first step, we statistically analyze the characteristics of the intrinsic PUF instances found in two device types, both based on a widely used ARM Cortex-M microcontroller. We show that the quality of the PUF characteristics is almost ideal. Subsequently, we propose a security architecture to protect the platform's firmware by using a modified boot loader. In a proof of concept, we embed our solution on a state-of-the-art commodity system-on-a-chip platform equipped with an MCU similar to the ones previously analyzed. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.