Emerging Trends on Physical Security

A special issue of Cryptography (ISSN 2410-387X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 September 2023) | Viewed by 3829

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
IDA, Institute of Computer and Network Engineering, Technische Universitaet Braunschweig, Hans-Sommer Str. 66, D-38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Interests: physical security; unclonable and clone-resistant architectures; intellectual property right protection for VLSI design cores; robot security; vehicular security; e-money; e-voting and error correction techniques
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Physical security in cryptographic systems is an emerging interdisciplinary and basic research area. In general, treating the physical “unclonability” of the system entities jointly with the cryptographic schemes involves complex issues due to its interdisciplinary nature. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs), as such technologies, have been introduced in the last two decades to fabricate physically unclonable units. Unclonable or non-replaceable physical units, in fact, represent a fundamental security anchor for attaining real resilient security systems. Emerging IoT (Internet of Things) and contemporary related work toward developing smart homes and smart cities—involving human beings, devices, structures, and virtually “everything”—represent a great interdisciplinary challenge facing the contemporary security research community. The continuous trend toward globalizing the networking of “virtually everything” opens new, very essential and relevant physical security requirements. System designers face globalized, unlimited,  borderless participating entities dealing with a variety of state regulations, forensic, political, and cultural issues. Publications treating physical security in the cryptographic environment are still far behind the intensively treated “soft” cryptographic techniques in the public literature. One ultimate goal in physical security is to approach the security level offered by biological systems, which still seems to be the most robust physical security ever known. Bio-inspired security can therefore be seen as a good reference model for targeted modern physical security systems. Biometrics have been so far successfully deployed in modern security systems. Mechatronic systems, and especially automotive systems, require “mechatronic security” techniques which are still far from being available for practical, real field applications.

This Special Issue on physical security is an attempt to stimulate more open scientific discussions in the research community addressing all related issues to this challenging topic.

Prof. Dr. Wael Adi
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • physical cryptographic security theory
  • physically unclonable functions (PUFs)
  • unclonable or clone-resistant units/devices/entities
  • unclonable or clone-resistant structures
  • side-channel attacks on physical security systems
  • physical security and related cryptographic schemes
  • bio-inspired security
  • provable physical uniqueness
  • automotive physical security
  • mechatronic security
  • biometric security
  • intellectual property protection

Published Papers (1 paper)

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20 pages, 1338 KiB  
Article
Efficient RO-PUF for Generation of Identifiers and Keys in Resource-Constrained Embedded Systems
by Macarena C. Martínez-Rodríguez, Luis F. Rojas-Muñoz, Eros Camacho-Ruiz, Santiago Sánchez-Solano and Piedad Brox
Cryptography 2022, 6(4), 51; https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography6040051 - 05 Oct 2022
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2997
Abstract
The generation of unique identifiers extracted from the physical characteristics of the underlying hardware ensures the protection of electronic devices against counterfeiting and provides security to the data they store and process. This work describes the design of an efficient Physical Unclonable Function [...] Read more.
The generation of unique identifiers extracted from the physical characteristics of the underlying hardware ensures the protection of electronic devices against counterfeiting and provides security to the data they store and process. This work describes the design of an efficient Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) based on the differences in the frequency of Ring Oscillators (ROs) with identical layout due to variations in the technological processes involved in the manufacture of the integrated circuit. The logic resources available in the Xilinx Series-7 programmable devices are exploited in the design to make it more compact and achieve an optimal bit-per-area rate. On the other hand, the design parameters can also be adjusted to provide a high bit-per-time rate for a particular target device. The PUF has been encapsulated as a configurable Intellectual Property (IP) module, providing it with an AXI4-Lite interface to ease its incorporation into embedded systems in combination with soft- or hard-core implementations of general-purpose processors. The capability of the proposed RO-PUF to generate implementation-dependent identifiers has been extensively tested, using a series of metrics to evaluate its reliability and robustness for different configuration options. Finally, in order to demonstrate its utility to improve system security, the identifiers provided by RO-PUFs implemented on different devices have been used in a Helper Data Algorithm (HDA) to obfuscate and retrieve a secret key. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Emerging Trends on Physical Security)
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