Unclonable Lightweight Authentication Scheme

We propose a lightweight, tamper-resilient challenge-response authentication scheme. The scheme that we propose (HB+PUF) is a variant of the PUF-HB protocol [1] which utilizes Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). We reduce the security of (HB+PUF) in the active attacker model to solving the LPN problem. The proposed scheme enjoys strong tamper-resilience due to the PUF properties. We present a proof of concept implementation for the proposed protocol. To generate the random bits needed for the protocol, we reuse the PUF circuit as a Random Number Generator (RNG). This construction shows to be cost-effective since we will be using the same hardware for authentication as well as random number generation without incuring any significant overhead. The overall scheme including storage, tamper-resilience and RNG can be achieved with less than 1000 gates. The small footprint should be ideal for constrained environments such as RFID’s, smart cards, and sensor networks.