SHAIP

Abstract

In this article, we present SHAIP, a secure Hamming distance–based mutual authentication protocol. It allows an unlimited number of authentications by employing an intrinsic Physical Unclonable Function (PUF). PUFs are being increasingly employed for remote authentication of devices. Most of these devices have limited resources. Therefore, the intrinsic PUFs are most suitable for this task as they can be built with little or no modification to the underlying hardware platform. One major drawback of the current authentication schemes is that they expose the PUF response. This makes the intrinsic PUFs, which have a limited number of challenge-response pairs, unusable after a certain number of authentication sessions. Moreover, these schemes are one way in the sense that they only allow one party, the prover, to authenticate herself to the verifier. We propose a symmetric mutual authentication scheme based on secure (privacy-preserving) computation of the Hamming distance between the PUF response from the remote device and reference response stored at the verifier end. This allows both parties to authenticate each other without revealing their respective sets of inputs. We show that our scheme is effective with all state-of-the-art intrinsic PUFs. The proposed scheme is lightweight and does not require any modification to the underlying hardware.