PUF Technology
In opposition to the conventional cryptography approach, there is a hardware security that relies on the physical characteristics of the digital circuit. Therefore, two identical chips from the same production line do not share the exact same physical characteristics. By exploiting these characteristics, we can provide new cryptographic function known as physical unclonable function (PUF) which is a robust and lightweight solution to secure IoT devices.
The main applications of PUFs are device authentication and secret key generation. Here is how the IoT can be authenticated by the server.
PUF authentication process
The PUF chip is directly connected to the server to receive generated bits, then the PUF provides the unique ID to be stored and used later in the verification phase by the server.
PUF chip is implemented into IoT devices to be authenticated by the server.
The server sends the original bits that has been utilized in the enrollment phase and the IoT device reply. If the unique ID match any entry in the original (stored) , the IoT devices is authenticated.