Webinar: Hardware Security: Functional Encryption and Chip Authentication

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Speaker: 

Dr. Keshab Parhi, Edgar F. Johnson Professor of Electronic Communication,  Distinguished McKnight University Professor, University of Minnesota

Abstract:

This talk will present approaches to functional obfuscation where the functionality is hidden by incorporating keys to a design such that the circuit only functions correctly if the key is correct. Various modes are introduced such that only the correct key triggers the correct functionality of the chip. One goal is to prevent foundries from manufacturing excess parts and third party vendors from selling in black market. Another goal is to prevent theft of intellectual property. A third goal of obfuscation is to prevent reverse engineering. I will introduce the notions of fixed and dynamic obfuscation. We will show that the time to find the key by trial and error can be increased exponentially with respect to the number of key bits with dynamic obfuscation. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss chip authentication using physical unclonable functions (PUFs). These are small circuits that can exploit manufacturing process variations to generate unique signatures of chips. These unique signatures, in the form of challenge-response pairs, can be stored in a server and can be used to authenticate devices. Various delay-based PUFs include multiplexer (MUX) PUF and ring-oscillator PUF. I will talk about modeling both linear and nonlinear MUX PUFs. We will show that both hard and soft responses of linear and nonlinear MUX PUFs can be modeled by artificial neural network. I will then talk about XOR PUFs and feed-forward XOR PUFs that are more secure and attack resistant. I will briefly mention ongoing research on accelerators for homomorphic encryption.

Speaker Bio: