A Plausibly Deniable Encryption Scheme Utilizing PUF’s Thermo-Sensitivity

Abstract

Deniable encryption is proposed to protect sensitive data against adversaries, even when the user has been coerced to reveal his private keys and other random parameters. However, current deniable encryption schemes or techniques either require the user to remember some tedious random parameters used in encryption or demand special designs in the file system. Any abnormality in the user’s behavior or in the file system tend to arouse suspicion, thus reduce the persuasion of the decrypted data. To cheat the adversary convincingly, we innovatively utilize the thermos-sensitivity of Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), to propose a novel and practical deniable encryption scheme, which enables the encryption system achieve deniability in a very covert way. The proposed scheme will automatically interpret the deniable ciphertext into different plaintexts at different temperatures and does not require any special designs in the file system. Furthermore, we successfully implement our scheme on Xilinx KC705 evaluation boards to prove its feasibility.