Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2015/583

Secure Key Generation from Biased PUFs

Roel Maes and Vincent van der Leest and Erik van der Sluis and Frans Willems

Abstract: PUF-based key generators have been widely considered as a root-of-trust in digital systems. They typically require an error-correcting mechanism (e.g. based on the code-offset method) for dealing with bit errors between the enrollment and reconstruction of keys. When the used PUF does not have full entropy, entropy leakage between the helper data and the device-unique key material can occur. If the entropy level of the PUF becomes too low, the PUF-derived key can be attacked through the publicly available helper data. In this work we provide several solutions for preventing this entropy leakage for PUFs suffering from bias. The methods proposed in this work pose no limit on the amount of bias that can be tolerated, which solves an important open problem for PUF-based key generation. Additionally, the solutions are all evaluated based on reliability, efficiency, leakage and reusability showing that depending on requirements for the key generator different solutions are preferable.

Category / Keywords: implementation / PUFs, key generation

Original Publication (with major differences): IACR-CHES-2015

Date: received 12 Jun 2015

Contact author: roel maes at intrinsic-id com

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: A shorter version of this paper was accepted for publication at CHES-2015.

Version: 20150621:080549 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2015/583

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion