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CALIT
Information Security | 25 October | From Hardware to Applications
Anti-counterfeiting technology based on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF)
Pim Tuyls, Philips Research, The Netherlands
Abstract
Counterfeiting of goods is becoming a huge problem for our society.
More and more goods are being counterfeited. Examples range from clothing to banknotes, smart-cards, Intellectual property, drugs etc. Usually this leads to revenue losses for the legitimate product owners, sometimes however it also causes tragic accidents with cars, planes and drugs.
In order to prevent counterfeiting, an unclonable mark has to be embedded into the product in an unseparable way. Alternatively the product itself has some unclonable physical properties that can be used for this purpose.
The concept of a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) for anti-counterfeiting purposes was introduced several years ago. It consists of an unconable physical structure that maps challenges to responses. They inherit the unclonability property from the large amount of physical randomness present. In many cases (and in the case of PUFs on an IC in particular) PUFs arise as a result of process variations during manufacturing.
We will present several examples of PUFs and explain the main algorithms to extract secret keys from PUFs. Then, we will show how PUFs in an IC are used to build secure memories and hence make the IC unclonable. Finally, we will explain how they are used to prevent counterfeiting of smart-cards and Intellectual property.
CV
Dr. Pim Tuyls studied Theoretical Physics at the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven where he got a Ph.D. on Quantum Dynamical Entropy in 1997. Currently he works as a Principal Scientist at Philips Research in the Netherlands where he is leading the applied crypto activities.
Since 2004, he is also a visiting professor at the Cosic institute in Leuven.
His main interests are in Key Extraction from Noisy Data (Physical Unclonable Functions and Private Biometrics, Quantum Cryptography) and in applications of Secure Multi-Party Computation. He was invited speaker at various academic and industrial conferences on Anti-Counterfeiting.