International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 21 June 2015

Roel Maes, Vincent van der Leest, Erik van der Sluis, Frans Willems
ePrint Report ePrint Report
PUF-based key generators have been widely considered as a root-of-trust in digital systems. They typically require an error-correcting mechanism (e.g. based on the code-offset method) for dealing with bit errors between the enrollment and reconstruction of keys. When the used PUF does not have full entropy, entropy leakage between the helper data and the device-unique key material can occur. If the entropy level of the PUF becomes too low, the PUF-derived key can be attacked through the publicly available helper data. In this work we provide several solutions for preventing this entropy leakage for PUFs suffering from bias. The methods proposed in this work pose no limit on the amount of bias that can be tolerated, which solves an important open problem for PUF-based key generation. Additionally, the solutions are all evaluated based on reliability, efficiency, leakage and reusability showing that depending on requirements for the key generator different solutions are preferable.

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