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1. Physical Unclonable Function (PUF)-Based e-Cash Transaction Protocol (PUF-Cash)

   https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography3030018  

   Calhoun, Jeff ; Minwalla, Cyrus ; Helmich, Charles ; Saqib, Fareena ; Che, Wenjie ; Plusquellic, Jim ( September 2019 , Cryptography)

   null (Ed.)

   Electronic money (e-money or e-Cash) is the digital representation of physical banknotes augmented by added use cases of online and remote payments. This paper presents a novel, anonymous e-money transaction protocol, built based on physical unclonable functions (PUFs), titled PUF-Cash. PUF-Cash preserves user anonymity while enabling both offline and online transaction capability. The PUF’s privacy-preserving property is leveraged to create blinded tokens for transaction anonymity while its hardware-based challenge–response pair authentication scheme provides a secure solution that is impervious to typical protocol attacks. The scheme is inspired from Chaum’s Digicash work in the 1980s and subsequent improvements. Unlike Chaum’s scheme, which relies on Rivest, Shamir and Adlemans’s (RSA’s) multiplicative homomorphic property to provide anonymity, the anonymity scheme proposed in this paper leverages the random and unique statistical properties of synthesized integrated circuits. PUF-Cash is implemented and demonstrated using a set of Xilinx Zynq Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Experimental results suggest that the hardware footprint of the solution is small, and the transaction rate is suitable for large-scale applications. An in-depth security analysis suggests that the solution possesses excellent statistical qualities in the generated authentication and encryption keys, and it is robust against a variety of attack vectors including model-building, impersonation, and side-channel variants. 

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2. Physical Unclonable Function (PUF)-based e-Cash Transaction Protocol (PUF-Cash)

   Jeff Calhoun, Cyrus Minwalla ( January 2019 , Cryptography)

   Electronic money (e‐money or e‐Cash) is the digital representation of physical banknotes augmented by added use cases of online and remote payments. This paper presents a novel, anonymous e‐money transaction protocol, built based on physical unclonable functions (PUFs), titled PUF‐Cash. PUF‐Cash preserves user anonymity while enabling both offline and online transaction capability. The PUF’s privacy‐preserving property is leveraged to create blinded tokens for transaction anonymity while its hardware‐based challenge–response pair authentication scheme provides a secure solution that is impervious to typical protocol attacks. The scheme is inspired from Chaum’s Digicash work in the 1980s and subsequent improvements. Unlike Chaum’s scheme, which relies on Rivest, Shamir and Adlemans’s (RSA’s) multiplicative homomorphic property to provide anonymity, the anonymity scheme proposed in this paper leverages the random and unique statistical properties of synthesized integrated circuits. PUF‐Cash is implemented and demonstrated using a set of Xilinx Zynq Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Experimental results suggest that the hardware footprint of the solution is small, and the transaction rate is suitable for large‐scale applications. An in‐depth security analysis suggests that the solution possesses excellent statistical qualities in the generated authentication and encryption keys, and it is robust against a variety of attack vectors including model‐building, impersonation, and side‐ channel variants. 

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3. An Integrated TRNG-PUF Architecture based on Photovoltaic Solar Cells

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MCE.2020.3019762  

   Degada, Amit ; Thapliyal, Himanshu ( August 2020 , IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine)

   null (Ed.)

   The objective of the article is to present an integrated True Random Number Generator (TRNG) and Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) architecture using Photovoltaic solar cells. We illustrate that the Photovoltaic (PV) solar cell sensor response can be engineered into dynamic (TRNG) and static responses (PUF). The proposed prototype uses the iterative Von Neumann post-processing scheme to produce random bits with 34% better throughput compared to a single Von Neumann operation. The random bit quality was checked by statistical test suites from the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and achieves an average p-value of 0.45 at all variations in light intensity. The PUF response achieves 92.13% reliability and 50.91% uniformity. The integrated TRNG-PUF architecture is beneficial for resource-constrained Cyber-Physical System (CPS). 

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4. Reconfigurable Multilevel Optical PUF by Spatiotemporally Programmed Crystallization of Supersaturated Solution

   https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202212294  

   Kim, Youngchan ; Lim, Jaemook ; Lim, Ji Hwan ; Hwang, Eunseung ; Lee, Hyunkoo ; Kim, Minwoo ; Ha, Inho ; Cho, Hyunmin ; Kwon, Jinhyeong ; Oh, Junho ; et al ( April 2023 , Advanced Materials)

   Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are emerging as an alternative to information security by providing an advanced level of cryptographic keys with non‐replicable characteristics, yet the cryptographic keys of conventional PUFs are not reconfigurable from the ones assigned at the manufacturing stage and the overall authentication process slows down as the number of entities in the dataset or the length of cryptographic key increases. Herein, a supersaturated solution‐based PUF (S‐PUF) is presented that utilizes stochastic crystallization of a supersaturated sodium acetate solution to allow a time‐efficient, hierarchical authentication process together with on‐demand rewritability of cryptographic keys. By controlling the orientation and the average grain size of the sodium acetate crystals via a spatiotemporally programmed temperature profile, the S‐PUF now includes two global parameters, that is, angle of rotation and divergence of the diffracted beam, in addition to the speckle pattern to produce multilevel cryptographic keys, and these parameters function as prefixes for the classification of each entity for a fast authentication process. At the same time, the reversible phase change of sodium acetate enables repeated reconfiguration of the cryptographic key, which is expected to offer new possibilities for a next‐generation, recyclable anti‐counterfeiting platform.

    

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5. Use of Thermistor Temperature Sensors for Cyber-Physical System Security

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s19183905  

   Labrado, Carson ; Thapliyal, Himanshu ; Prowell, Stacy ; Kuruganti, Teja ( September 2019 , Sensors)

   null (Ed.)

   The last few decades have seen a large proliferation in the prevalence of cyber-physical systems. This has been especially highlighted by the explosive growth in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Unfortunately, the increasing prevalence of these devices has begun to draw the attention of malicious entities which exploit them for their own gain. What makes these devices especially attractive is the various resource constraints present in these devices that make it difficult to add standard security features. Therefore, one intriguing research direction is creating security solutions out of already present components such as sensors. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are one potential solution that use intrinsic variations of the device manufacturing process for provisioning security. In this work, we propose a novel weak PUF design using thermistor temperature sensors. Our design uses the differences in resistance variation between thermistors in response to temperature change. To generate a PUF that is reliable across a range of temperatures, we use a response-generation algorithm that helps mitigate the effects of temperature variation on the thermistors. We tested the performance of our proposed design across a range of environmental operating conditions. From this we were able to evaluate the reliability of the proposed PUF with respect to variations in temperature and humidity. We also evaluated the PUF’s uniqueness using Monte Carlo simulations. 

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