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Solving the software protection problem with intrinsic personal physical unclonable functions
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Solving the software protection problem with intrinsic personal physical unclonable functions

Rishab Nithyanand and Radu Sion
SANDIA Report, SAND2011-6603, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Albuquerque, NM, and Livermore, CA (United States)
09/01/2011
DOI: 10.2172/1030331
url
https://doi.org/10.2172/1030331View
Open Access

Abstract

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) or Physical One Way Functions (P-OWFs) are physical systems whose responses to input stimuli (i.e., challenges) are easy to measure (within reasonable error bounds) but hard to clone. The unclonability property comes from the accepted hardness of replicating the multitude of characteristics introduced during the manufacturing process. This makes PUFs useful for solving problems such as device authentication, software protection, licensing, and certified execution. In this paper, we focus on the effectiveness of PUFs for software protection in offline settings. We first argue that traditional (black-box) PUFs are not useful for protecting software in settings where communication with a vendor's server or third party network device is infeasible or impossible. Instead, we argue that Intrinsic PUFs are needed to solve the above mentioned problems because they are intrinsically involved in processing the information that is to be protected. Finally, we describe how sources of randomness in any computing device can be used for creating intrinsic-personal-PUFs (IP-PUF) and present experimental results in using standard off-the-shelf computers as IP-PUFs.
 Communications COMPUTER CODES COMPUTERS GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE HARDNESS LICENSING MANUFACTURING PROCESSING RANDOMNESS STIMULI

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