Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security

Modern integrated circuits are manufactured across global supply chains that introduce opportunities for tampering, counterfeiting, and covert modification long before a chip reaches its intended application. Hardware security researchers study how to detect and prevent these threats—using techniques like Physical Unclonable Functions, which exploit nanoscale manufacturing variation to give each chip a unique, unclonable identity, and logic encryption, which obscures a circuit's function from anyone who lacks a secret key. A persistent challenge is that many proposed defenses, including PUF-based authentication schemes, have proven vulnerable to machine learning attacks that model a device's behavior from observed input-output pairs. Active work focuses on making these primitives more resilient to modeling, understanding how scan chains and other test interfaces leak sensitive information, and developing verification methods that can confirm a chip has not been silently altered during fabrication or distribution.

Works

21,862

Total citations

227,084

Keywords

Physical Unclonable FunctionsHardware TrojansLogic EncryptionFPGA SecurityAnti-CounterfeitingPUF-Based Authentication