Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2014/741

Eliminating Leakage in Reverse Fuzzy Extractors

André Schaller, Taras Stanko, Boris Škorić, Stefan Katzenbeisser

Abstract: In recent years Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have been proposed as a promising building block for key storage and device authentication. PUFs are physical systems and as such their responses are inherently noisy, precluding a straightforward derivation of cryptographic key material from raw PUF measurements. To overcome this drawback, Fuzzy Extractors are used to eliminate the noise and guarantee robust outputs. A special type are Reverse Fuzzy Extractors, shifting the computational load of error correction towards a computationally powerful verifier. However, the Reverse Fuzzy Extractor reveals error patterns to any eavesdropper, which may cause privacy issues (due to a systematic drift of the PUF responses, the error pattern is linkable to the identity) and even security problems (if the noise is data-dependent). In this work we investigate both these issues and propose modified protocols that eliminate the problems.

Category / Keywords: PUFs, fuzzy extractors, ECC

Date: received 23 Sep 2014, last revised 18 Jan 2017

Contact author: schaller at seceng informatik tu-darmstadt de

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20170118:185621 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2014/741