Abstract
The last few decades have seen a large proliferation in the prevalence of cyber-physical systems. This has been especially highlighted by the explosive growth in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Unfortunately, the increasing prevalence of these devices has begun to draw the attention of malicious entities which exploit them for their own gain. What makes these devices especially attractive is the various resource constraints present in these devices that make it difficult to add standard security features. Therefore, one intriguing research direction is creating security solutions out of already present components such as sensors. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are one potential solution that use intrinsic variations of the device manufacturing process for provisioning security. In this work, we propose a novel weak PUF design using thermistor temperature sensors. Our design uses the differences in resistance variation between thermistors in response to temperature change. To generate a PUF that is reliable across a range of temperatures, we use a response-generation algorithm that helps mitigate the effects of temperature variation on the thermistors. We tested the performance of our proposed design across a range of environmental operating conditions. From this we were able to evaluate the reliability of the proposed PUF with respect to variations in temperature and humidity. We also evaluated the PUF’s uniqueness using Monte Carlo simulations.
Highlights
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are known to contain more security risks than conventional computing devices [1]
The authors believe that creating a Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) from components that are already commonly found in cyber-physical systems could improve the viability of integrating PUFs with these devices
In this work we propose a methodology that allows for using thermistor temperature sensors to create a PUF that is targeted for application in cyber-physical systems
Summary
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are known to contain more security risks than conventional computing devices [1]. A common functionality in many cyber-physical systems is the ability to monitor physical entities such as temperature, humidity, pressure, luminosity, etc This can range from being a core function such as a sensor node in an IoT network [17] to being tangential such as a Home Energy Management. The authors believe that creating a PUF from components that are already commonly found in cyber-physical systems could improve the viability of integrating PUFs with these devices This type of PUF would present a way to add security features without incurring substantial overhead costs in the form of new hardware. In this work we propose a methodology that allows for using thermistor temperature sensors to create a PUF that is targeted for application in cyber-physical systems. PUF and presents the results of those tests; Section 5 compares our proposed PUF to existing sensor-based PUF designs; and Section 6 concludes the paper by providing a summary of our results
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