A modeling attack resistant deception technique for securing lightweight-PUF based authentication

• Main Authors: Gu, Chongyan, Chang, Chip Hong, Liu, Weiqiang, Yu, Shichao, Wang, Yale, O’Neill, Máire
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering; Machine Learning Attacks; Physical Unclonable Function; Authentication Protocol; Deception Protocol; Poison Attack
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/152417
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Silicon physical unclonable function (PUF) has emerged as a promising spoof-proof solution for low-cost device authentication. Due to practical constraints in preventing phishing through public network or insecure communication channels, simple PUF-based authentication protocol with unrestricted queries and transparent responses is vulnerable to modeling and replay attacks. Although PUF itself is lightweight, the ancillary cryptographic primitives required to support secure handshaking in classical PUF-based authentication protocol is not necessarily so. In this paper, we present a modeling attack resistant PUFbased mutual authentication scheme to mitigate the practical limitations in applications where a resource-rich server authenticates a device with no strong restriction imposed on the type of PUF design or any additional protection on the binary channel used for the authentication. Our scheme uses an active deception protocol to prevent machine learning (ML) attacks on a device with a monolithic integration of a genuine Strong PUF (SPUF), a fake PUF, a pseudo random number generator (PRNG), a register, a binary counter, a comparator and a simple controller. The hardware encapsulation makes collection of challenge response pairs (CRPs) easy for model building during enrollment but prohibitively time-consuming upon device deployment through the same interface. A genuine server can perform a mutual authentication with the device using a combined fresh challenge contributed by both the server and the device. The message exchanged in clear cannot be manipulated by the adversary to derive unused authentic CRPs. The adversary will have to either wait for an impractically long time to collect enough real CRPs by directly querying the device or the ML model derived from the collected CRPs will be poisoned to expose the imposer when it is used to perform a spoofing attack. The false PUF multiplexing is fortified against prediction of waiting time by doubling the time penalty for every unsuccessful guess. Our implementation results on field programmable gate array (FPGA) device and security analysis have corroborated the low hardware overheads and attack resistance of the proposed deception protocol.