Towards security without secrets

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are a promising new cryptographic primitive that leverage manufacturing variation to create unclonable secrets in embedded systems. In this case, the secret is no longer stored permanently in digital form, but rather as the physical properties of the manufactured chip. Further, the recent proposal of "Public Model Physical Unclonable Functions" (PPUFs) does not contain any secrets at all. Instead, PPUFs propose to use a constant-factor computational speedup to distinguish an unclonable hardware device from a digital simulation. This thesis presents a new computational fuzzy extractor and stateless PUF leveraging Learning Parity with Noise (LPN). This method significantly improves over the state-of-the-art in extracting stable secrets from PUFs and has a clear security reduction to a well-accepted cryptographic assumption (LPN). In addition, this dissertation proposes for the first time a formalism describing Public Model Physical Unclonable Functions based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs), a conjecture on the form of ODE integrators, and a formal reduction of PPUF security to this conjecture. This result is extended to compare analog and digital computing more generally. Finally, this thesis provides direction for implementing a PPUF.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Herder, Charles H. (Charles Henry), III

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Srinivas Devadas.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/103729

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/103729