Security Down to the Hardware Level

Abstract

This chapter introduces the concept of Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), their prospects for hardware security in IoT devices, and their interaction with traditional cryptography. Section 8.1 summarizes the background on PUFs, whereas Sect. 8.2 covers the metrics that are commonly used to evaluate PUF performance. Such metrics are used to comparatively review the state of the art on PUFs in Sect. 8.3. Section 8.4 covers vulnerabilities to malicious attacks attempting to clone or mimic a PUF. In the last section, we introduce the novel concept of PUF-enhanced cryptography as a promising direction aiming to merge PUFs and cryptography in a cohesive framework for IoT hardware-level security.