Auto-PUFChain: An Automated Interaction Tool for PUFs and Blockchain in Electronic Supply Chain

Abstract

Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) primitives and blockchain technologies, also known as PUFchain, are recently taking huge attention to integrate the security parameters in Supply Chain Management (SCM) system. In this work, we devise a technique to interface an electronic chip and a blockchain platform by providing access to a unique hardware fingerprint and the stored information of chips on blockchain at one single point. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only scalable and automated technique that has been successfully implemented to authenticate the hardware device at any stage of the supply chain management system. The technique realises the concept of embedded PUF instance and the smart contract deployment on the ethereum blockchain. In the proposed technique, we have highly reduced the cost of implementing the interaction by storing the CRP on a distributed file system called as InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Further, we implement and analyse the interfacing for ‘IC traceability’ to ensure the current ownership of a product, its point of origin, and ownership history in the SCM system. We employ Nexys 4 DDR Artix-7 FPGA board and go-ethereum blockchain library for implementing “IC traceability” to demonstrate the workflow and overhead involved in our interfacing technique.