Lightweight Random Obfuscation Protocol: A PUF-based Mutual Authentication Protocol for IoT Devices

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are a promising technology that can offer lightweight authentication for low-power IoT Devices. PUFs leverage the unique physical properties of each device to create a distinctive identifier that can be used for authentication purposes, with no additional hardware or software required. This paper introduces the Lightweight Random Obfuscation Protocol, a PUF-based protocol that secures its challenge-response exchange using random flipping of exchanged response bits. The protocol uses a TRNG to obfuscate the response bits while keeping track of the parity of the non-flipped responses to use for authentication. The protocol’s security is analyzed by performing simulated machine-learning attacks. The analysis showed that when properly tuned, the protocol is highly resilient against such machine-learning attacks. The LRO protocol’s exceptionally lightweight nature makes it highly suitable for highly constrained IoT devices.