A Secure Low-Cost Edge Device Authentication Scheme for the Internet of Things

Because of the enhanced capability of adversaries, edge devices of Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure are now increasingly vulnerable to counterfeiting and piracy. Ensuring the authenticity of such devices is of great concern since an adversary can create a backdoor either to bypass the security, and/or to leak secret information over an unsecured communication channel. The reliability of such devices could also be called into question because they might be counterfeit, defective and/or of inferior quality. It is of prime importance to design and develop solutions for authenticating such edge devices. In this paper, we present a novel low-cost solution for authenticating edge devices. We use SRAM based PUF to generate unique "digital fingerprints" for every device, which can be used to generate a unique device ID. We propose a novel ID matching scheme to verify the identity of an edge device even though the PUF is extremely unreliable. We show that the probability of impersonating an ID by an adversary is extremely low. In addition, our proposed solution is resistant to various known attacks.