Physical Unclonable Functions

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Researcher: Gavin McWilliams

Research Institution: Queen’s University Belfast

Overview:

Gavin McWilliams from Queen’s University Belfast is seeking industry partners to help validate PUF use in PKI deployments to enhance privacy and integrity of user data whilst also reducing the operational complexity of PKI.

Product:

• A Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) Cryptographic function which generates a unique identity for a device;
• A PUF is able to distinguish between inconsistencies on a molecular scale in integrated circuits (IC) that occur during fabrication and thus uniquely identify any device that contains such an IC;
• If an IC is tampered with the characteristics of the PUF will be changed;
• To verify the authenticity of a device a challenge is sent to the PUF and it will compute a unique response;
• If the device is cloned or has been tampered with, the cloned/tampered response will differ from that of the genuine device; and
• The requirements of an effective PUF solution include robustness, stability, uniqueness, low-cost and resistance to environmental variations.

Market:

• Designs being integrated into the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) defined by the emerging Vehicle to Grid (V2G) Communication Interface (ISO/IEC DIS 15118-2) for use in an Electric Vehicle (EV) charging system; and
• A PUF-PKI solution can be used to uniquely identify entities within the Vehicle to Grid Transfer Protocol (V2GTP) to improve the security of authentication in V2GTP and detect cloned or tampered devices within an EV charging infrastructure.

Benefits:

• A PUF embedded in electronic products provides a strong hardware based authentication mechanism;
• It solves the problem of key storage which is encountered by traditional authentication mechanisms;
• Implementable with a relatively small hardware investment; and
• Resistant to spoofing attacks.

Partners:

Industry partners are sought to help validate PUF use in PKI deployments to enhance privacy and integrity of user data whilst also reducing the operational complexity of PKI.

Contact Details:

Email Gavin McWilliams at g.mcwilliams@qub.ac.uk

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