A digital PUF-based IP protection architecture for network embedded systems

In this paper we present an architecture for a secure embedded system that is resilient to tempering and code injection attacks and offers anti-piracy protection for the software and hardware Intellectual Property (IP). We incorporate digital Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) in an authentication mechanism at the machine code level. The digital PUFs are used to de-obfuscate, at run time, a firmware that's issued by a central authority with very little performance and resource overhead. Each PUF is unique to the hosting device, and at the same time can be reconfigured with new seeds. The reconfigurable digital PUFs (drPUFs) have much lower risks of side-channel attacks and vastly higher number of usable challenge-response pairs, while retaining the speed and ease to implementation of digital PUFs.