A Secret Key Generation Scheme for Internet of Things using Ternary-States ReRAM-based Physical Unclonable Functions

Abstract: Some of the main challenges towards utilizing conventional cryptographic techniques in Internet of Things (IoT) include the need for generating secret keys for such a large-scale network, distributing the generated keys to all the devices, key storage as well as the vulnerability to security attacks when an adversary gets physical access to the devices. In this paper, a novel secret key generation method is proposed for IoTs that utilize the intrinsic randomness embedded in the devices' memories introduced in the manufacturing process. A fuzzy extractor structure using serially concatenated BCH-Polar codes is proposed to generate reproducible keys from a ReRAM-based \emph{ternary-state} Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) for device authentication and secret key generation. The ReRAM based PUFs are the most practical choice for authentication and key generation in IoT, as they operate at or below the systems' noise level and therefore are less vulnerable to side channel attacks compared to the alternative memory technologies. However, the current ReRAM-based PUFs present a high false negative authentication rate since the behavior of these devices can vary in different physical conditions that results in a low probability of regenerating the same response in different attempts. In this paper, we propose a secret key generation scheme for ternary state PUFs that enables reliable reconstruction of the desired secret keys utilizing a serially concatenated BCH-Polar fuzzy extractor. The experimental results show that the proposed model can offer a significantly lower probability of mismatch between the original key and the regenerated ones, while a less number of \textit{Helper data} bits were used to extract the \textit{Key} when compared to previously proposed fuzzy extractor techniques.