Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security

Modern electronics depend on the assumption that the hardware running our software is trustworthy, but a chip can be subtly altered during fabrication, cloned without authorization, or probed to leak secrets through channels its designers never anticipated. Hardware security research addresses these threats by studying how physical properties of silicon can be harnessed—for instance, Physical Unclonable Functions exploit nanoscale manufacturing variations to give each chip a fingerprint that is practically impossible to duplicate—and by developing techniques to detect malicious circuit modifications, called Hardware Trojans, that may be inserted anywhere along a global supply chain. A persistent open challenge is that many defensive measures, including logic encryption and PUF-based authentication, have proven vulnerable to machine learning attacks that reverse-engineer their behavior from observed input-output pairs. Ongoing work therefore focuses on designing constructions that remain secure under adversarial modeling, protecting the scan infrastructure used for testing from becoming a side channel, and building formal foundations for what "unclonability" and "obfuscation" actually guarantee in practice.

Works

22,811

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232,683

Keywords

Physical Unclonable FunctionsHardware TrojansLogic EncryptionFPGA SecurityAnti-CounterfeitingPUF-Based Authentication