Lightweight Secure Keys Management Based on Physical Unclonable Functions

Abstract

The concept behind Internet of Things (IoT) involves connecting physical objects to the internet and endowing them with the ability to identify one another and exchange data. This communication paradigm arises new security challenges. Mainly, authenticity of network nodes, to let ones with malicious intent not thrive in such a network; and confidentiality, when sensitive data have to be exchanged. Most classical security techniques are not suitable to address such issues, especially in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) where network nodes are developed using resource-constrained devices. Consequently, the scientific literature has been starting to investigate how Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), a unique digital identifier obtained from physical variability induced by integrated circuit manufacturing process, could be exploited to provide security mechanisms. In this paper, we present ConPHEMAP, a new lightweight PUF-based key management-scheme for point-to-point communications. The proposed scheme extends the PHEMAP protocol and inherits same properties, including flexibility since can be adopted either in the case where both nodes are provided with PUFs or when only one of them includes it. We also conducted a security analysis to verify the protocol resilience against different kinds of attacks, which proves its suitability in a heterogeneous insecure context such as WSNs.