Towards secure cyber-physical information association for parts

Counterfeiting is a significant problem for safety-critical systems, since cyber-information, such as a quality control certification, may be passed off with a flawed counterfeit part. Safety-critical systems, such as planes, are at risk because cyber-information cannot be provably tied to a specific physical part instance (e.g., impeller). This paper presents promising initial work showing that using piezoelectric sensors to measure impedance identities of parts may serve as a physically unclonable function that can produce unclonable part instance identities. When one of these impedance identities is combined with cyber-information and signed using existing public key infrastructure approaches, it creates a provable binding of cyber-information to a specific part instance. Our initial results from experimentation with traditionally and additively manufactured parts indicate that it will be extremely expensive and improbable for an attacker to counterfeit a part that replicates the impedance signature of a legitimate part.