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1. PUFchain 3.0: Hardware-Assisted Distributed Ledger for Robust Authentication in Healthcare Cyber–Physical Systems

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s24030938  

   Bathalapalli, Venkata K.; Mohanty, Saraju P.; Kougianos, Elias; Iyer, Vasanth; Rout, Bibhudutta (February 2024, Sensors)

   This article presents a novel hardware-assisted distributed ledger-based solution for simultaneous device and data security in smart healthcare. This article presents a novel architecture that integrates PUF, blockchain, and Tangle for Security-by-Design (SbD) of healthcare cyber–physical systems (H-CPSs). Healthcare systems around the world have undergone massive technological transformation and have seen growing adoption with the advancement of Internet-of-Medical Things (IoMT). The technological transformation of healthcare systems to telemedicine, e-health, connected health, and remote health is being made possible with the sophisticated integration of IoMT with machine learning, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and other technologies. As healthcare systems are becoming more accessible and advanced, security and privacy have become pivotal for the smooth integration and functioning of various systems in H-CPSs. In this work, we present a novel approach that integrates PUF with IOTA Tangle and blockchain and works by storing the PUF keys of a patient’s Body Area Network (BAN) inside blockchain to access, store, and share globally. Each patient has a network of smart wearables and a gateway to obtain the physiological sensor data securely. To facilitate communication among various stakeholders in healthcare systems, IOTA Tangle’s Masked Authentication Messaging (MAM) communication protocol has been used, which securely enables patients to communicate, share, and store data on Tangle. The MAM channel works in the restricted mode in the proposed architecture, which can be accessed using the patient’s gateway PUF key. Furthermore, the successful verification of PUF enables patients to securely send and share physiological sensor data from various wearable and implantable medical devices embedded with PUF. Finally, healthcare system entities like physicians, hospital admin networks, and remote monitoring systems can securely establish communication with patients using MAM and retrieve the patient’s BAN PUF keys from the blockchain securely. Our experimental analysis shows that the proposed approach successfully integrates three security primitives, PUF, blockchain, and Tangle, providing decentralized access control and security in H-CPS with minimal energy requirements, data storage, and response time. 

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2. iTPM: Exploring PUF-based Keyless TPM for Security-by-Design of Smart Electronics

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISVLSI59464.2023.10238586  

   Bathalapalli, Venkata K.; Mohanty, Saraju P.; Kougianos, Elias; Iyer, Vasanth; Rout, Bibhudutta (June 2023, 2023 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI))

   Fernanda Kastensmidt Ricardo Reis Aida Todri-Sanial Hai (Ed.)

   The scope of Smart electronics and its increasing market worldwide has made cybersecurity an important challenge. The Security-by-Design (SbD) principle, an emerging cybersecurity area, focuses on building security/privacy-enabled primitives at the design stage of an electronic system. This paper proposes a novel Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) based Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for SbD primitive. The proposed SbD primitive works by performing secure verification of the PUF key using TPM’s Encryption and Decryption engine. The securely verified PUF Key is then bound to TPM using Platform Configuration Registers (PCR). PCRs in TPM facilitate a secure boot process and effective access control to TPM’s NonVolatile memory through an enhanced authorization policy. By binding PUF with PCR in TPM, a novel PUF-based access control policy can be defined, bringing in a new security ecosystem for the emerging Internet-of-Everything era. The proposed SbD approach has been experimentally validated by successfully integrating various PUF topologies with Hardware TPM. 

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3. PMsec 2.0: A Security-By-Design Solution for Doctor’s Dilemma Problem in Smart Healthcare

   https://doi.org/10.1109/OCIT59427.2023.10430808  

   Bathalapalli, Venkata K.; Mohanty, Saraju P.; Kougianos, Elias; Iyer, Vasanth; Rout, Bibhudutta (December 2023, Proceedings of the OITS International Conference on Information Technology (OCIT))

   The rapid adoption of Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) has revolutionized e-health systems, particularly in remote patient monitoring. With the growing adoption of Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) in delivering technologically advanced health services, the security of Medtronic devices is pivotal as the security and privacy of data from these devices are directly related to patient safety. PUF has been the most widely adopted hardware security primitive which has been successfully integrated with various Internet-of-Things (IoT) based applications, particularly in smart healthcare for facilitating device security. To facilitate security and access control to IoMT devices, this work proposes a novel cybersecurity solution using PUF for facilitating global access to IoMT devices. The proposed framework presents an approach that enables the patient’s body area network devices supported by PUF to be securely accessible and controllable globally. The proposed cybersecurity solution has been experimentally validated using state-of-the-art SRAM PUF, a delay based PUF, and a trusted platform module (TPM) primitive. 

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4. Veda-PUF: A PUF based on Vedic Principles for Robust Lightweight Security for IoT

   https://doi.org/10.1109/iSES52644.2021.00097  

   Yanambaka, Venkata P.; Mohanty, Saraju P.; Kougianos, Elias; Baniya, Babu K.; Rout, Bibhudutta (December 2021, IEEE International Symposium on Smart Electronic Systems (iSES))

   Sahula, Vineet; Mohanty, Saraju (Ed.)

   This paper proposes a new controlled Physical Unclonable Function (PUF), Veda-PUF, which uses an algorithm for pre-processing and post-processing the input and output of PUF to increase the security of the keys generated in Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The key size of the PUF can be increased using the proposed protocol without compromising the integrity of the keys generated. The uniqueness of the generated keys was 50 % and the reliability of the keys generated is 99.9 % which are close to the ideal values. The proposed control algorithm also increases the uniqueness and reliability of the PUF keys after processing. This increases the number of PUF keys that can be used for various applications. 

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5. Developing Quantum Trusted Platform Module (QTPM) to Advance IoT Security

   https://doi.org/10.3390/fi17050193  

   Xu, Guobin; Adetifa, Oluwole; Mao, Jianzhou; Sakk, Eric; Wang, Shuangbao (May 2025, Future Internet)

   Randomness is integral to computer security, influencing fields such as cryptography and machine learning. In the context of cybersecurity, particularly for the Internet of Things (IoT), high levels of randomness are essential to secure cryptographic protocols. Quantum computing introduces significant risks to traditional encryption methods. To address these challenges, we propose investigating a quantum-safe solution for IoT-trusted computing. Specifically, we implement the first lightweight, practical integration of a quantum random number generator (QRNG) with a software-based trusted platform module (TPM) to create a deployable quantum trusted platform module (QTPM) prototype for IoT systems to improve cryptographic capabilities. The proposed quantum entropy as a service (QEaaS) framework further extends quantum entropy access to legacy and resource-constrained devices. Through the evaluation, we compare the performance of QRNG with traditional Pseudo-random Number Generators (PRNGs), demonstrating the effectiveness of the quantum TPM. Our paper highlights the transformative potential of integrating quantum technology to bolster IoT security. 

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