Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2010/251

Modeling Attacks on Physical Unclonable Functions

Ulrich Rührmair and Frank Sehnke and Jan Sölter and Gideon Dror and Srinivas Devadas and Jürgen Schmidhuber

Abstract: We show in this paper how several proposed Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) can be broken by numerical modeling attacks. Given a set of challenge-response pairs (CRPs) of a PUF, our attacks construct a computer algorithm which behaves indistinguishably from the original PUF on almost all CRPs. This algorithm can subsequently impersonate the PUF, and can be cloned and distributed arbitrarily. This breaks the security of essentially all applications and protocols that are based on the respective PUF.

The PUFs we attacked successfully include standard Arbiter PUFs and Ring Oscillator PUFs of arbitrary sizes, and XOR Arbiter PUFs, Lightweight Secure PUFs, and Feed-Forward Arbiter PUFs of up to a given size and complexity. Our attacks are based upon various machine learning techniques, including Logistic Regression and Evolution Strategies. Our work will be useful to PUF designers and attackers alike.

Category / Keywords: Implementation / Physical Unclonable Functions, Cryptanalysis, Machine Learning, Physical Cryptography

Publication Info: ---

Date: received 1 May 2010, last revised 3 May 2010

Contact author: ruehrmai at in tum de

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20100503:080643 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2010/251

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