Paper 2015/305

Foundations of Reconfigurable PUFs (Full Version)

Jonas Schneider and Dominique Schröder

Abstract

A Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) can be seen as a source of randomness that can be challenged with a stimulus and responds in a way that is to some extent unpredictable. PUFs can be used to provide efficient solutions for common cryptographic primitives such as identification/authentication schemes, key storage, and hardware-entangled cryptography. Moreover, Brzuska et al.~have recently shown, that PUFs can be used to construct UC secure protocols (CRYPTO 2011). Most PUF instantiations, however, only provide a static challenge/response space which limits their usefulness for practical instantiations. To overcome this limitation, Katzenbeisser et al. (CHES 2011) introduced Logically Reconfigurable PUFs (LR-PUFs), with the idea to introduce an ``update'' mechanism that changes the challenge/response behaviour without physically replacing or modifying the hardware. In this work, we revisit LR-PUFs. We propose several new ways to characterize the unpredictability of LR-PUFs covering a broader class of realistic attacks and examine their relationship to each other. In addition, we reconcile existing constructions with these new characterizations and show that they can withstand stronger adversaries than originally shown. Since previous constructions are insecure with respect to our strongest unpredictability notion, we propose a secure construction which relies on the same assumptions and is almost as efficient as previous solutions.

Note: Full version of the paper presented at ACNS 2015.