Solving the software protection problem with intrinsic personal physical unclonable functions.

Nithyanand, Rishab (Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY) ; Sion, Radu (Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY)

Sandia National Laboratories

关键词: Randomness;    Computer Codes;    99 General And Miscellaneous//Mathematics, Computing, And Information Science;    Computers;    Processing;   

DOI  :  10.2172/1030331
RP-ID  :  SAND2011-6603
RP-ID  :  AC04-94AL85000
RP-ID  :  1030331

美国|英语

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) or Physical One Way Functions (P-OWFs) are physical systems whose responses to input stimuli (i.e., challenges) are easy to measure (within reasonable error bounds) but hard to clone. The unclonability property comes from the accepted hardness of replicating the multitude of characteristics introduced during the manufacturing process. This makes PUFs useful for solving problems such as device authentication, software protection, licensing, and certified execution. In this paper, we focus on the effectiveness of PUFs for software protection in offline settings. We first argue that traditional (black-box) PUFs are not useful for protecting software in settings where communication with a vendor's server or third party network device is infeasible or impossible. Instead, we argue that Intrinsic PUFs are needed to solve the above mentioned problems because they are intrinsically involved in processing the information that is to be protected. Finally, we describe how sources of randomness in any computing device can be used for creating intrinsic-personal-PUFs (IP-PUF) and present experimental results in using standard off-the-shelf computers as IP-PUFs.