Remote Integrity Checking using Multiple PUF based Component Identifiers

Abstract

Modern Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) contain sophisticated and valuable electronic components, and this makes them a prime target for counterfeiting. In this thesis, we consider a method to test if a PCB is genuine. One high-level solution is to use a secret identifier of the board, together with a cryptographic authentication protocol. We describe a mechanism that authenticates all major components of PCB as part of attesting the PCB. Our authentication protocol constructs the fingerprint of PCB by extracting hardware fingerprint from the components on PCB and cryptographically combining the fingerprints. Fingerprints from each component on PCB are developed using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF).

In this thesis, we present a PUF based authentication protocol for remote integrity checking using multiple PUF component level identifiers. We address the design on 3 different abstraction levels. 1)Hardware Level, 2)Hardware Integration level, 3)Protocol level. On the hardware level, we propose an approach to develop PUF from flash memory component on the device. At the hardware Integration level, we discuss a hardware solution for implementing a trustworthy PUF based authentication. We present a prototype of the PUF based authentication protocol on an FPGA board via network sockets.