CT-ER: Exploring Physical Functions for Lightweight and Robust Cryptography

低成本设备，如RFID、智能卡、传感器节点等，正在成为构建下一代普适和泛在的异质网络的关键。鉴于产量巨大，单位制造成本将在这些技术的采用中发挥关键作用。这些设备在可用计算能力和占用空间方面受到限制。然而，它们的加密单元往往是设备体系结构中要求最高的组件之一，需要针对物理篡改进行加固。该项目正在利用硬件异常来实现加密目的。即使随着芯片制造的进步和变得更加精确，人们总是可以预期生产线上会出现微小的变化，这些变化可以用来区分同一生产线上生产的任何物理设备。该团队正在开发模型、流程和硬件原语，这些模型、流程和硬件原语有助于实现利用这些个人指纹的目标，以便它们可以用于有效地识别设备并实现安全、防篡改的通信。这一倡议正在从物理功能提供低成本、防篡改的加密技术，从而在采用一系列有利于国民经济和国家安全的产品和应用方面发挥有利作用。该项目的结果包括新的物理不可克隆函数(PUF)构造，其中特别强调了自然允许减少计算困难问题的构造、启用PUF的密码构建块(例如安全和高效的存储、抗篡改状态机等)。以及启用PUF的加密原语(例如，认证方案、块密码、伪随机生成器)。

Low cost devices, e.g. RFIDs, smartcards, sensor nodes, etc., are becoming crucial for building the next generation pervasive and ubiquitous heterogeneous networks. Given the massive volume, the per-unit manufacturing cost will play a key role in the adoption of these technologies. These devices are constrained in their available computational power and footprint. Yet, their cryptographic units, which tend to be among the most demanding components in the device architecture, need to be hardened against physical tampering. The project is exploiting hardware anomalies for cryptographic ends. Even as chip manufacturing progresses and becomes more precise, one can always expect slight variations along the production line which can be used to distinguish one physical device from any other manufactured on the same production line. The team is developing models, processes and hardware primitives which contribute to the goal of exploiting these individual fingerprints so that they can be used to efficiently identify devices and enable secure, tamper-resilient communication. This initiative is providing low-cost, tamper-resilient cryptography from physical functions, and thereby plays an enabling role in the adoption of a wide array of products and applications to the benefit of the national economy and national security. The results of this project include new physically unclonable function (PUF) constructions with a particular emphasis on constructions which naturally permit reduction to computationally difficult problems, PUF-enabled cryptographic building blocks (such as secure and efficient storage, tamper-resilient state machines, etc.) and PUF-enabled cryptographic primitives (e.g. authentication schemes, block ciphers, pseudo-random generators).