Realizing Robust, Lightweight Strong PUFs for Securing Smart Grids

Improving the reliability of energy distribution systems is a major concern to multiple parties as they are not only critical infrastructure themselves, but also affect other connected infrastructure. Smart Grids have been proposed to leverage the advantages of Internet of Things (IoT) to allow smarter management and faster recovery of energy distribution systems against disruptions. However, Smart Grid applications require a reliable, lightweight and fast authentication system to realize their potential in a secure manner. In this work, we propose a Strong PUF (physically unclonable function) system that can meet the stringent resource and performance constraints imposed by a Smart Grid operational environment. Our results indicate that the proposed mechanism produces a Strong PUF with close to ideal normalized uniqueness of 50 % and an accuracy of 50 % to modeling attacks using the best known machine learning algorithms. Additionally, our scheme has a low hardware overhead cost of
$750~ \mu m^{2}$
in 45 nm technology and a sub-1 ms key generation time, ensuring the entire system is fast and lightweight.