SRAM-PUF-Based Entities Authentication Scheme for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

• Published in: IEEE internet of things journal 2021-04, Vol.8 (7), p.5904-5913
• Main Authors: Farha, Fadi, Ning, Huansheng, Ali, Karim, Chen, Liming, Nugent, Christopher
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Access control; Actuators; Authentication; Cloud computing; Devices; Entity authentication; Internet of Things; Logic gates; physical security; Physical unclonable function; Random access memory; Security systems; SRAM cells; Static random access memory; static random access memory (SRAM)-physical unclonable {function (PUF)}; Thermal stability
• ISSN: 2327-4662; 2327-4662
• DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2020.3032518

With the development of the cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT), people and things can request services, access data, or control actuators located thousands of miles away. The entity authentication of the remotely accessed devices is an essential part of the security systems. In this vein, physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are a hot research topic, especially for generating random, stable, and tamper-resistant fingerprints. This article proposes a lightweight, robust static random access memory (SRAM)-PUF-based entity authentication scheme to guarantee that the accessed end devices are trustable. The proposed scheme uses challenge-response pairs (CRPs) represented by reordered memory addresses as challenges and the corresponding SRAM cells' startup values as responses. The experimental results show that our scheme can efficiently authenticate resources-constrained IoT devices with a low computation overhead and small memory capacity. Furthermore, we analyze the SRAM-PUF by testing the PUF output under different environmental conditions, including temperature and magnetic field, in addition to exploring the effect of writing different values to the SRAM cells on the stability of their startup values.