SensoPUF: Securing Sensor Data Using PUF for Lightweight Security

The Internet of Things (IoT) makes sensors an integral part of daily life. Securing sensor data became the utmost necessity for critical applications. Traditional cryptographic systems cannot prevent physical attacks, and being resource-hungry, are not suitable for low-cost IoT devices. Physically Unclonable Function (PUF), an emerging hardware security primitive, can be utilized to ensure sensor security. The existing PUF-based protocols used the unintended sensitivity of the PUF response (output) to environmental variation to secure sensor data. However, these protocols suffer from various issues, like limited authentication problems, only guaranteeing the integrity of sensor data, and being susceptible to security threats. Moreover, most of these protocols only exploit the unreliable (unstable) response bits of the PUF response. We propose a lightweight security protocol for sensor data, utilizing the reliable response bits of PUF to maintain authenticity and confidentiality, and the unreliable response bits to verify sensor data. The protocol successfully overcomes the limitations and security issues of the existing protocols. The BAN logic and Scyther protocol analyzer tool formally validate the protocol’s correctness and security. Further, the practical feasibility of the protocol is verified using an arbiter PUF implemented on Spartan-3E FPGA, considering temperature as the ambient parameter.