PUF-AES-PUF: a novel PUF architecture against non-invasive attacks
This addresses security vulnerabilities in hardware authentication systems, offering a robust defense against machine learning and side-channel attacks, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing PUF and AES components.
The paper tackles the vulnerability of physical unclonable functions (PUFs) to non-invasive attacks by proposing a PUF-AES-PUF architecture that embeds an AES circuit between two PUFs to conceal challenge-response pairs and updates the secret key in real-time. The result shows that the proposed PUF resists cracking even with 1 million attack attempts, whereas conventional PUFs leak information with only 5,000 or 1,000 attempts.
In this letter, a physical unclonable function (PUF)-advanced encryption standard (AES)-PUF is proposed as a new PUF architecture by embedding an AES cryptographic circuit between two conventional PUF circuits to conceal their challenge-to-response pairs (CRPs) against machine learning attacks. Moreover, an internal confidential data is added to the secret key of the AES cryptographic circuit in the new PUF architecture to update the secret key in real-time against side-channel attacks. As shown in the results, even if 1 million number of data are enabled by the adversary to implement machine learning or side-channel attacks, the proposed PUF can not be cracked. By contrast, only 5,000 (1,000) number of data are sufficient to leak the confidential information of a conventional PUF via machine learning (side-channel) attacks.