Development of highly secure and reliable authentication system based on physically unclonable hardware identifier

2023 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 20K19765
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Basic Section 60040:Computer system-related
• Research Institution: Tohoku University
• Principal Investigator: Ueno Rei 東北大学, 電気通信研究所, 助教 (80826165)
• Project Period (FY): 2020-04-01 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: 物理複製困難関数 (PUF) / hardware root-of-trust / 暗号 / 情報セキュリティ

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Wwe developed multiple methods to extract hardware IDs from Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) with extremely high efficiency and reliability based on probabilistic techniques. Among these methods, the most recent proposal demonstrated significantly higher efficiency in extracting hardware IDs compared to existing methods in most standard scenarios, allowing for up to a 55% reduction in hardware implementation costs of PUFs while ensuring equivalent security. Furthermore, as cryptographic authentication modules based on PUFs can be vulnerable to various side-channel attacks, we evaluated side-channel attacks to extract secret and authentication keys generated by PUFs. Subsequently, we confirmed the effectiveness of countermeasures such as masking and cryptographic key transformation.

Free Research Field

ハードウェアセキュリティ

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本研究成果は，確率的アルゴリズムの有効性をPUFに基づく認証システムの構築に応用することで，現実的コストで実装可能な手法の中で到達可能な効率性の解明に大きく貢献した．また，PUFは暗号アルゴリズム・プロトコルにおける「信頼の起点 (root-of-trust)」として扱うことで暗号アルゴリズム・プロトコルの信頼をハードウェアから保証するという重要な役割がある．本成果によりPUFを信頼の起点として扱うコストが大幅に削減したことで，ハードウェアroot-of-trustの普及，そしてより安全・高信頼な情報社会に貢献する．