A PUF-based paradigm for IoT security

Physically Unclonable Functions or PUFs have emerged as a promising lightweight authentication alternative to traditional cryptography. This made them a promising candidate for constrained IoT devices. These PUFs however have been found to be vulnerable to modeling attacks to varying degrees. The security of different PUFs designs against these modeling attacks have been evaluated in multiple research efforts. However, a more accurate evaluation that incorporates the area footprints of the different PUFs is missing from the literature. Such evaluation is rather essential in order to determine the most suitable PUF design for the different constrained IoT devices. To perform this evaluation, we implemented several strong delay-based PUFs. The results showed that when factoring in the PUFs implementation area costs, these PUFs compare differently as some enhanced PUF designs turned out to have inferior efficiency compared to their simpler counterpart. We recognized the most effective design elements in the implemented PUFs. Based on the efficiency figures obtained, we recommended the optimal PUF design for the different security schemes used in constrained IoT devices.