A Reconfigurable Scan Network based IC Identification for Embedded Devices
Omid Aramoona, Xi Chenb and Gang Quc
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Institute for Systems Research University of Maryland, College Park, USA
aoaramoon@umd.edu
bxchen128@umd.edu
cgangqu@umd.edu
ABSTRACT
Most of the Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded devices are resource constrained, making it impractical to secure them with the traditional computationally expensive crypto-based solutions. However, security and privacy are crucial in many IoT applications such as health monitoring. In this paper, we consider one of the most fundamental security problems: how to identify and authenticate an embedded device. We consider the fact that embedded devices are designed by reusing IP cores with reconfigurable scan network (RSN) as the standard testing facility and propose to generate unique integrated circuit (IC) identifications (IDs) based on different configurations for the RSN. These circuit IDs not only solve the IC and device identification and authentication problems, they can also be considered as a lightweight security primitive in other applications such as IC metering and IP fingerprinting. We demonstrate through the ITC’02 benchmarks that the proposed approach can easily create from 107 to 10186 unique IDs without any overhead. Finally, our method complies with the IEEE standards and thus has high practical value.
Keywords: Device identification, lightweight authentication, IoT, reconfigurable scan chain, digital fingerprint, hardware security primitives.
