A New Group-to-Group Authentication Scheme Based on PUFs and Blockchain

Abstract

Traditional Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs)- based authentication protocols, whether based on Weak PUFs or Strong PUFs, have an obvious problem that once the PUFs circuit is damaged, all the authentication processes will fail. In addition, for the authentication protocols based on Strong PUFs, a large number of Challenge-Response Pairs (CRPs) of PUFs need to be stored by the trusted third-party central server in advance. Once the central server is attacked, the attacker can use the obtained CRPs to model the PUFs or directly use these CRPs for pseudo authentication, which will seriously affect the security of the authentication protocols. In this paper, we propose a new group-to-group (G2G) authentication scheme based on PUFs and Blockchain to solve the above problems. Each group composed of a set of devices is also a peer in the blockchain system. We use blockchain to record the transfer path of data shard and the CRPs as the shard’s authentication data to perform peer-to-peer (P2P) authentication instead of one central server-to-many devices (O2M). Under the trust that the blockchain builds and with the distributed P2P nature of blockchain, the proposed scheme can improve the security of traditional Strong PUF-based authentication protocols and can also monitor and replace the PUFs circuit if they were damaged. Finally, the prototype of our system is implemented using chaincode and tested on Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform under the P2P distributed storage scenario.