Authentication is one of the fundamental primitives to establish security in ubiquitous systems. The current best practice for authentication relies upon cryptography and secure keys. Such an approach can hardly be scaled to emerging applications due to its high-power consumption and vulnerabilities to physical and cryptographic attacks. Strong Physically Unclonable Function (SPUF) promises a lightweight and secure authentication method based on physical disorders. So far, SPUFs with the desired security properties has only been demonstrated with optics or biology. But it is not practical to integrate them with electronics in mobile and ubiquitous systems. This project explores technologies to enable secure and practical SPUFs on silicon chips, which addresses the needs for security solutions in emerging ubiquitous electronics. The project also includes training and teaching graduate and undergraduate students on hardware security.
This project aims to emulate the proven optically disordered SPUF system with an electrical percolation system built on CMOS platforms for authentication. The inter-disciplinary project will be carried out with three objectives: CMOS-compatible electrical percolation nanostructures; CMOS readout circuits and alternative integration strategies; system design and assessment of proof-of-principle SPUFs. The project includes analysis and optimization of the cross-layer design space involving the degree of uncorrelation for nanostructures, the measurement resolution of circuits, and the complexity of encoding schemes. Overall, the project can potentially create a radically different and complete solution to the challenge of authenticating ubiquitous hardware devices.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
