Design and Implementation of PUF-Based "Unclonable" RFID ICs for Anti-Counterfeiting and Security Applications

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) exploit the physical characteristics of the silicon and the IC manufacturing process variations to uniquely characterize each and every silicon chip. Since it is practically impossible to model, copy, or control the IC manufacturing process variations, PUFs not only make these chips unique, but also effectively unclonable. Exploiting the inherent variations in the IC manufacturing process, PUFs provide a secure, robust, low cost mechanism to authenticate silicon chips. This makes PUFs attractive for RFID ICs where cost and security are the key requirements. In this paper we present the design and implementation of PUF enabled "unclonable" RFIDs. The PUF-enabled RFID has been fabricated in 0.18 mu technology, and extensive testing results demonstrate that PUFs can securely authenticate an RFID with minimal overheads. We also highlight the advantages of PUF based RFIDs in anti-counterfeiting and security applications.

[1]  Sandra Dominikus,et al.  Strong Authentication for RFID Systems Using the AES Algorithm , 2004, CHES.

[2]  Boris Skoric,et al.  Robust Key Extraction from Physical Uncloneable Functions , 2005, ACNS.

[3]  Boris Skoric,et al.  Information-Theoretic Security Analysis of Physical Uncloneable Functions , 2005, Financial Cryptography.

[4]  G. Edward Suh,et al.  Extracting secret keys from integrated circuits , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems.

[5]  Marten van Dijk,et al.  A technique to build a secret key in integrated circuits for identification and authentication applications , 2004, 2004 Symposium on VLSI Circuits. Digest of Technical Papers (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37525).

[6]  Elgar Fleisch,et al.  From Identification to Authentication; ; ; Networked RFID systems and lightweight cryptography : raising barriers to product counterfeiting , 2007 .

[7]  Srinivas Devadas,et al.  Silicon physical random functions , 2002, CCS '02.

[8]  R. Pappu,et al.  Physical One-Way Functions , 2002, Science.

[9]  Martin Feldhofer,et al.  A Case Against Currently Used Hash Functions in RFID Protocols , 2006, OTM Workshops.

[10]  Stephen A. Benton,et al.  Physical one-way functions , 2001 .

[11]  Lejla Batina,et al.  RFID-Tags for Anti-counterfeiting , 2006, CT-RSA.

[12]  Sandip Sen,et al.  Learning and Adaption in Multi-Agent Systems , 2006 .

[13]  Mikko Lehtonen,et al.  From Identification to Authentication – A Review of RFID Product Authentication Techniques , 2008 .

[14]  Leonid Bolotnyy,et al.  Physically Unclonable Function-Based Security and Privacy in RFID Systems , 2007, Fifth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom'07).