SLATE: A Secure Lightweight Entity Authentication Hardware Primitive

Abstract

Lightweight cryptography has become more and more important in recent years because of the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and usage of smart mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a novel secure lightweight entity authentication hardware primitive called SLATE, where its area is about 50% to more than 3X smaller than existing lightweight ciphers and strong physical unclonable functions (PUFs), respectively. Even though the authentication of SLATE is done through challenge response pair (CRP) verification similar to strong PUFs, the source of the key for SLATE must be coming from any existing secret key storage used for any ciphers. A main advantage of SLATE over most existing strong PUFs being an entity authentication primitive is that SLATE is resistant to known attacks to strong PUFs or logic obfuscations, such as model building attacks and Boolean satisfiability (SAT) attacks. Furthermore, we show that the implementation cost of SLATE with a 176-bit key and 244 CRPs is only 663 gate equivalents (GEs). Compared with lightweight ciphers and existing secure strong PUFs, we show that SLATE is a practical security primitive for resource constrained systems for its extremely small footprint and security. Finally, we show that SLATE is information theoretically secure when valid CRPs are communicated through insecure channels.