Identities for embedded systems enabled by physical unclonable functions

Abstract

Embedded systems, such as automotive control units, industrial automation systems, RFID tags or mobile devices are dominated by integrated circuits implementing their functionality. Since these systems operate in increasingly networked or untrusted environments, their protection against attacks and malicious manipulations becomes a critical security issue. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) represent an interesting solution to enable security on embedded systems, since they allow identification and authentication of CMOS devices without non-volatile memory. In this paper, we explain benefits and applications of PUFs and give an overview of popular implementations. Further, we show that PUFs face hardware as well as modeling attacks. Therefore, specific analyses and hardening has to be performed, in order to establish PUFs as a reliable security primitive for embedded systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.