Hardware device binding and mutual authentication
| DWPI Title: Method for cryptographically authenticating hardware devices, involves periodically re-authenticating second device as major authentication cycles, and periodically performing key exchange as minor authentication cycles |
| Abstract: Detection and deterrence of device tampering and subversion by substitution may be achieved by including a cryptographic unit within a computing device for binding multiple hardware devices and mutually authenticating the devices. The cryptographic unit includes a physically unclonable function ("PUF") circuit disposed in or on the hardware device, which generates a binding PUF value. The cryptographic unit uses the binding PUF value during an enrollment phase and subsequent authentication phases. During a subsequent authentication phase, the cryptographic unit uses the binding PUF values of the multiple hardware devices to generate a challenge to send to the other device, and to verify a challenge received from the other device to mutually authenticate the hardware devices. |
| Use: Method for cryptographically authenticating hardware devices, for detecting and deterring device tampering and subversion. |
| Advantage: The trustworthiness of deployed information processing systems is improved by cryptographically binding multiple hardware devices and allowing the hardware devices to mutually authenticate to one another to protect against device tampering and subversion by substitution. Hence security is improved by allowing integrated circuits (ICs) to verify that the other ICs interact with the same ICs that are bound to during previous enrollment phase. Since the unauthorized changes to the system can be detected by the ICs within the system, the security is ensured, the adversary from reverse generation of the seed value is prevented, and the codeword can be selected randomly. The codes are concatenated for improving the error correcting ability. The binding algorithm can be used for data exchange during the authentication procedure, hence the need for asymmetric cryptographic operations during authentication is eliminated. The keys needed by the devices to verify the signatures can be protected with physically unclonable functions (PUFs), hence the need for the devices to store cryptographic variables in non-volatile memory is eliminated. |
| Novelty: The method (400) involves retrieving (403) helper data that is generated using hardware identifiers of respective devices. The second hardware identifier is extracted using helper data and first hardware identifier. A first challenge is generated (411) using second hardware identifier and is sent (413) to second device. A second challenge is received (415) and is verified using first hardware identifier. The second device is periodically re-authenticated as major authentication cycles, and key exchange is periodically performed as minor authentication cycles. |
| Filed: 10/20/2010 |
| Application Number: US2010908131A |
| Tech ID: SD 11599.0 |
| This invention was made with Government support under Contract No. DE-NA0003525 awarded by the United States Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration. The Government has certain rights in the invention. |
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