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A Comprehensive Comparison of Fuzzy Extractor Schemes Employing Different Error Correction Codes
(2023)
This thesis deals with fuzzy extractors, security primitives often used in conjunction with Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). A fuzzy extractor works in two stages: The generation phase and the reproduction phase. In the generation phase, an Error Correction Code (ECC) is used to compute redundant bits for a given PUF response, which are then stored as helper data, and a key is extracted from the response. Then, in the reproduction phase, another (possibly noisy) PUF response can be used in conjunction with this helper data to extract the original key.
It is clear that the performance of the fuzzy extractor is strongly dependent on the underlying ECC. Therefore, a comparison of ECCs in the context of fuzzy extractors is essential in order to make them as suitable as possible for a given situation. It is important to note that due to the plethora of various PUFs with different characteristics, it is very unrealistic to propose a single metric by which the suitability of a given ECC can be measured.
First, we give a brief introduction to the topic, followed by a detailed description of the background of the ECCs and fuzzy extractors studied. Then, we summarise related work and describe an implementation of the ECCs under consideration. Finally, we carry out the actual comparison of the ECCs and the thesis concludes with a summary of the results and suggestions for future work.
CNT-PUFs: highly robust and heat-tolerant carbon-nanotube-based physical unclonable functions
(2023)
In this work, we explored a highly robust and unique Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) based on the stochastic assembly of single-walled Carbon NanoTubes (CNTs) integrated within a wafer-level technology. Our work demonstrated that the proposed CNT-based PUFs are exceptionally robust with an average fractional intra-device Hamming distance well below 0.01 both at room temperature and under varying temperatures in the range from 23 °C to 120 °C. We attributed the excellent heat tolerance to comparatively low activation energies of less than 40 meV extracted from an Arrhenius plot. As the number of unstable bits in the examined implementation is extremely low, our devices allow for a lightweight and simple error correction, just by selecting stable cells, thereby diminishing the need for complex error correction. Through a significant number of tests, we demonstrated the capability of novel nanomaterial devices to serve as highly efficient hardware security primitives.