Hardware Implementation of Keyless Encryption Scheme for Internet of Things Based on Image of Memristors
This work addresses authentication for IoT devices, but it is incremental as it builds on existing keyless and PUF technologies with a specific hardware focus.
The authors tackled the challenge of implementing secure authentication for resource-constrained IoT devices by proposing a hardware-based keyless encryption scheme using memristors and microcontrollers, achieving a practical implementation on an evaluation board without requiring physical memristor components.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly increasing the number of connected devices. This causes new concerns towards solutions for authenticating numerous IoT devices. Most of these devices are resource-constrained. Therefore, the use of long-secret keys, in traditional cryptography schemes can be hard to implement. Also, the key generation, distribution, and storage are very complex. Moreover, the goal of many reported cyber-attacks is accessing the key. Therefore, researchers have shown an increased interest in designing keyless encryption schemes recently. In this report, we are going to explain the details of the implementation of the keyless protocol by taking advantage of known technology modules such as microcontrollers (MCU), and hash functions. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have been used in many cryptographic applications such as Password Management Systems, key exchange, Key Generation. In this report, we are going to explain the details of the hardware implementation of keyless encryption in the MCU. Different kinds of memristors have been used in the past. In this work, a look-up-table containing memristor cells value at the various current levels is used since the physical component is unavailable yet. The hardware that is used to implement the system is an evaluation-board of SAMV71 MCU, which is used to implement the control system and hardware hashing.