Extracting Secret Keys from Integrated Circuits [abstract] (IEEE Xplore, PDF)
Daihyun Lim, Jae W. Lee, Blaise Gassend, G. Edward Suh, Marten van Dijk, and Srinivas Devadas
IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems (TVLSI), October 2005.
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 conditional access systems
such as smartcards and ATMs. Arbiter-based physical unclonable
functions (PUFs) exploit the statistical delay variation of wires and
transistors across integrated circuits (ICs) in manufacturing
processes to build unclonable secret keys.We fabricated arbiter-based
PUFs in custom silicon and investigated the identification capability,
reliability, and security of this scheme. Experimental results and
theoretical studies showthat a sufficient amount of inter-chip
variation exists to enable each IC to be identified securely and
reliably over a practical range of environmental variations such as
temperature and power supply voltage. We show that arbiter-based PUFs
are realizable and well suited to build, for example, key-cards that
need to be resistant to physical attacks.