Lombardi, Daniele (2024) Exploiting Physical Unclonable Functions to secure resource-constrained devices. [Tesi di dottorato]

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Abstract

In the last decades Physical Unclonable Functions have emerged as a promising hardware security primitive for protecting devices with scarse resources -- such as low-power microcontrollers with limited memory--, commonly found in the Internet of Things. Nonetheless, their practical adoption in real scenarios is hampered by still open issues. Ensuring the quality of a PUF implementation is the first step to be taken to avoid jeopardizing the security of devices to be protected. However, its comprehensive characterization requires significant challenges to overcome, such as, for example, a large-scale experimentation and a fair comparison with other possible implementations. Furthermore, designing PUF-based security applications for devices with limited resources is a field yet to be fully explored. Existing solutions are often not suitable or do not adequately address some typical IoT challenges, such as secure group communication among devices with dynamic membership. Ultimately, the shift towards multi-user paradigm further complicates the adoption of PUFs. While such paradigms improve scalability and efficiency of resources, they are completely incompatible with the security guarantees provided by the current PUF model. This thesis resolves these challenges by proposing tools, methodologies, and models to support the design, the implementation, and the evaluation of PUF-based security solutions. Key contributions include a flexible tool for large-scale automated PUFs assessment on FPGA; lightweight secure protocols optimized for constrained environments; and, solutions that, by preserving the security properties of PUFs, enable their use in multi-user contexts.

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