A Theoretical Analysis: Physical Unclonable Functions and The Software Protection Problem

Technical Report · Thu Sep 01 04:00:00 EDT 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1113875· OSTI ID:1113875

Nithyanand, Rishab ^[1]; Solis, John H. ^[2]

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1. Stony Brook Univ., NY (United States)
2. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-CA), Livermore, CA (United States)

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. This property of unclonability is due to the accepted hardness of replicating the multitude of uncontrollable manufacturing characteristics and makes PUFs useful in 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 and show that traditional non-computational (black-box) PUFs cannot solve the problem against real world adversaries in offline settings. Our contributions are the following: We provide two real world adversary models (weak and strong variants) and present definitions for security against the adversaries. We continue by proposing schemes secure against the weak adversary and show that no scheme is secure against a strong adversary without the use of trusted hardware. Finally, we present a protection scheme secure against strong adversaries based on trusted hardware.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States); Solis, John Hector
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1113875
• Report Number(s): SAND2011--6673; 464611
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING