Extracting secret keys from integrated circuits

Modern cryptographic protocols are based on the premise that only authorized participants can obtain secret keys and access to information systems. However, various kinds of tampering methods have been devised to extract secret keys from widely fielded conditional access systems such as smartcards and ATMs. As a solution, Arbiter-based Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are proposed. This technique exploits statistical delay variation of wires and transistors across integrated circuits (ICs) in the manufacturing processes to build a secret key unique to each IC. We fabricated Arbiter-based PUFs in custom silicon and investigated the identification based PUFs in custom silicon and investigated the identification capability, reliability, and security of this scheme. Experimental results and theoretical studies show that a sufficient amount of variation exists across ICs. This variation enables each IC to be identified securely and reliably over a practical range of environmental variations such as temperature and power supply voltage. Thus, arbiter-based PUFs are well-suited to build key-cards and membership cards that must be resistant to cloning attacks.

Department dc:contributor.department

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

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Lim, Daihyun, 1976-

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/1721.1/18059

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/18059