Addressing Security Issues of the Internet of Things Using Physically Unclonable Functions

Abstract

The spatial ubiquity and the huge number of employed nodes monitoring the surroundings, individuals, and devices makes security a key challenge in IoT. Serious security apprehensions are evolving in terms of data authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality. Consequently, IoT requires security to be assured down to the hardware level, as the authenticity and the integrity need to be guaranteed in terms of the hardware implementation of each IoT node. Physically unclonable functions recreate the keys only while the chip is being powered on, replacing the conventional key storage which requires storing information. Compared to extrinsic key storage, they are able to generate intrinsic keys and are far less susceptible against physical attacks. Physically unclonable functions have drawn considerable attention due to their ability to economically introduce hardware-level security into individual silicon dice. This chapter introduces the notion of physically unclonable functions, their scenarios for hardware security in IoT devices, and their interaction with traditional cryptography.