Everything You Wanted to Know About PUFs

A new concept, known as physically unclonable functions (PUFs) has recently been investigated to mitigate this problem. The principal idea in a PUF is that the cryptographic key is not stored in memory. Instead, the binary data comprising the key are hidden in the form of unique analog identifiers within the hardware and are available only upon the execution of the decrypting software on a designated authorized integrated circuit (IC). This ensures that the key is completely unavailable when the circuit is powered down, and, conversely, when the circuit is turned on, these analog values are converted into a binary code and are used as if they were a key stored in memory. In this article, the basic concepts behind PUFs are analyzed, highlights of important results from the recent literature are summarized, and application perspectives are presented.