LIGHTWEIGHT SOLUTIONS TO SECURE IOT USING PHYSICAL UNCLONABLE FUNCTION

Abstract

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) offer a lightweight, energy-efficient security primitive for IoT devices, addressing limitations in traditional cryptographic approaches. By exploiting inherent manufacturing variations in integrated circuits, PUFs enable authentication, data integrity, and confidentiality with minimal resource overhead. This dissertation makes several key contributions to the field of PUF-based security. First, we introduce a novel delay-based Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) PUF with configurable primitive feedback, providing a compact architecture, large challenge response space, and low hardware and power consumption. The design is implemented on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), where it achieves near-ideal statistical properties, including 49.92% uniformity, 50.08% uniqueness, and resistance against several machine learning attacks. Additionally, we propose a novel integrity-based PUF protocol satisfying practical security requirements, namely incorporating the Integrity Preserving (IP) security, and threat model, namely Physically Active Attacks (PAA). The protocol is formally verified evaluated and achieved robust protection against cloning, replay, Man-in-the-Middle (MITM), and brute-force attacks, all while maintaining minimal computational complexity using XOR-based transformations. Storage and communication overhead analyses show that the system scales linearly, requiring only 0.96 MB for 10,000 devices at 771 bits per device per session. Finally, this work proposes a PUF-based authenticated encryption protocol that simultaneously guarantees data confidentiality and integrity. Developed within the Integrity-Confidentiality Preserving (ICP) framework, this protocol avoids traditional cryptographic primitives such as Message Authentication Code (MAC) and digital signatures. Instead, it leverages PUF entropy and XOR operations to perform secure encryption with minimal overhead. Formal security analysis proves its resistance to tampering and quantum attacks. Experimental validation shows successful mitigation of real-world replay and modification attempts using Wireshark and adversarial simulations. Through rigorous analysis, simulations, and experimental validation, this dissertation advances the state of the art in PUF-based security, laying a stronger foundation for scalable and lightweight cryptographic solutions tailored for IoT environments.

Date of Award	2026
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Science and Engineering