Physically Unclonable Functions and AI: Two Decades of Marriage
This work provides a review and insights for researchers in hardware security and cryptography, but it is incremental as it builds on existing connections between AI and software security.
The paper reviews the relationship between artificial intelligence and hardware security, focusing on using AI methods to assess the security of physically unclonable functions (PUFs) and exploring AI-designed PUFs for applications like authentication and key generation.
The current chapter aims at establishing a relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and hardware security. Such a connection between AI and software security has been confirmed and well-reviewed in the relevant literature. The main focus here is to explore the methods borrowed from AI to assess the security of a hardware primitive, namely physically unclonable functions (PUFs), which has found applications in cryptographic protocols, e.g., authentication and key generation. Metrics and procedures devised for this are further discussed. Moreover, By reviewing PUFs designed by applying AI techniques, we give insight into future research directions in this area.