Delay-based circuit authentication and applications

ABSTRACT

We describe a technique to reliably identify individual integrated circuits (ICs), based on a prior delay characterization of the IC.We describe a circuit architecture for a key card for which authentication is delay based, rather than based on a digital secret key. We argue that key cards built in this fashion are resistant to many known kinds of attacks.Since the delay of ICs can vary with environmental conditions such as temperature, we develop compensation schemes and show experimentally that reliable authentication can be performed in the presence of significant environmental variations.The delay information that is extracted from the IC can also be used to generate keys for use in classical cryptographic primitives. Applications that rely on these keys for security would be less vulnerable to physical attack.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS

General Terms:
Experimentation, Measurement, Security

Keywords:
physical random function, physical security, smartcard, tamper resistance, unclonability