Towards a Secure Key Generation and Sto...

Sensors have an essential role in the currently emerging Internet of Things (IoT) whereby these resource constrained nodes sense the environment, process the sensed data and forward it to a central entity. As some of this data might be sensitive in nature, it is crucial to ensure certain security guarantees on the sensed data such as integrity, confidentiality, and authenticity. Certain cryptographic primitives offer these security properties based on the assumption that each node is capable of generating and storing its secret key securely. Existing solutions for secure key storage are based on secure non-volatile memory. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are lightweight hardware security primitives that bind a unique key to each device and provide resistance against key compromise attacks as the key exists in form of hardware manufacturing variations, which are difficult to read as compared to memory based alternative solutions. Therefore, in this work we present a PUF-based lightweight, secure key generation and storage framework for resource constrained sensor nodes. Our implementation of a ring oscillator (RO) PUF based key generation scheme shows that the PUF based key generation consumes only a small part of a typical visual sensor node’s resources.