Paper 2015/1239

Secure Goods Supply Chain and Key Exchange with Virtual Proof of Reality

Yansong Gao, Damith C. Ranasinghe, Said F. Al-Sarawi, and Derek Abbott

Abstract

A new security protocol of {\it virtual proof of reality} (VP) is recently proposed by Ruhrmair {\it et al.} The VP allows one party, the prover, making a physical statement to the other party, the verifier, over a digital communication channel without using any secret keys except the message sent between these two parties. The physical statement could be a physical feature---eg. temperature---or phenomena---eg. destruction---of the hardware in the prover's system. We present two applications---secure key exchange and secure goods supply chain---building on the VP of temperature, location, and destruction. Moreover, we experimentally demonstrate the first electrical circuit-based VP of destruction through the proposed hardware security primitive---a hybrid memristor and physical unclonable function (memristor-PUF) architecture, which takes advantage of the PUF extracted from static variations of CMOS devices inherent to the fabrication process and dynamic variations attributed to switching variabilities of nano memristors.