Intrinsic PUFs for commodity devices

Abstract

There has been a consistent trend of growth in recent years in the number and interconnectedness of embedded devices in all areas of life. Embedded systems are cheaper, more accessible, and more versatile than ever. The ubiquity of these systems and their intersection with critical areas means that practical security solutions are more essential than ever, but many conventional security solutions are not well suited to low resource embedded systems because of power usage, time, hardware resource, or computational constraints.

One solution that has been proposed is the Physical Unclonable Function (PUF), a hardware security primitive which generates identifiers from low level manufacturing process variations. 

In this thesis several novel designs and improvements for Intrinsic PUFs are proposed and experimentally validated, with an aim towards achieving practical Intrinsic PUFs for ubiquitous underlying technologies that currently lack such a design.

Date of Award	Jul 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	National Cyber Security Centre
Supervisor	Ciara Rafferty (Supervisor), Chongyan Gu (Supervisor) & Maire O'Neill (Supervisor)