Physical One-Way Functions

By Ravikanth Pappu, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, Neil A. Gershenfeld. Science, 2002

1,509 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Modern cryptographic practice rests on the use of one-way functions, which are easy to evaluate but difficult to invert. Unfortunately, commonly used one-way functions are either based on unproven conjectures or have known vulnerabilities. We show that instead of relying on number theory, the mesoscopic physics of coherent transport through a disordered medium can be used to allocate and authenticate unique identifiers by physically reducing the medium's microstructure to a fixed-length string of binary digits. These physical one-way functions are inexpensive to fabricate, prohibitively difficult to duplicate, admit no compact mathematical representation, and are intrinsically tamper-resistant. We provide an authentication protocol based on the enormous address space that is a principal characteristic of physical one-way functions.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e310160e95d9f7d92369725b27da453d3e5365b

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Citations in the corpus

Physical Unclonable Functions and Applications: A Tutorial (2014, positive): “One of the first implementations of a strong PUF was constructed by Pappu et al. in 2001 [30].”
Phase control algorithms for focusing light through turbid media (2007, background): “1a and c), we controlled the incident wavefront to exactly match scattering in the sample.”
Physically Unclonable Functions (2012, background): “[110] serves as an exemplary prototype PUF, meeting all mentioned properties to a major extent.”
Physical Unclonable Functions for Device Authentication and Secret Key Generation (2007, methodology): “For example, Pappu proposed an optical PUF, which uses the speckle patterns of optical medium for laser light [12].”
Security of IoT systems: Design challenges and opportunities (2014, background): “The use of randomly connected LUT networks for security is ﬁrst proposed in [27] The outputs from a LUT network exhibit excellent statistical security properties; for example they pass all NIST randomness tests [28] They also satisfy the avalanche criterion In terms of application, they enable both…”
Physical unclonable functions (2020, methodology): “The first well-known PUF was the related optical PUF, which was initially dubbed a physical one-way function 9 .”
On Improving the Security of Logic Locking (2016, methodology): “To thwart SAT-based attacks, one might consider the use of physical unclonable functions (PUFs) [41].”
Controlled physical random functions (2002, methodology): “Visiting researcher from Philips Research, Prof Holstlaan 4, Eindhoven , The Netherlands. software licensing.”
Modeling attacks on physical unclonable functions (2010, background): “Since their responses are processed internally 1Strong PUFs have also been referred to as Physical Random Functions [5], or Physical One-Way Functions [6]. as a secret key, error correction must be carried out on-chip and with perfect precision.”
FPGA Intrinsic PUFs and Their Use for IP Protection (2007, background): “Pappu et al. [28,29] introduced the idea of Physical One-Way Function (POWF).”
Physically Unclonable Functions: A Study on the State of the Art and Future Research Directions (2010, methodology): “Optical PUFs based on transparent media were proposed in [38, 39] as physical one-way functions (POWF).”
Counterfeit Integrated Circuits: A Rising Threat in the Global Semiconductor Supply Chain (2014, background): “The applied stimulus is called the challenge, and the reaction of the PUF is called the response [24].”
RFID-Tags for Anti-counterfeiting (2006, methodology): “In particular, we present a solution based on PUFs that are inseparably bound to an IC.”
PUF Modeling Attacks on Simulated and Silicon Data (2013, neutral): “1556-6013 © 2013 IEEE IE EE P ro of W eb V er sio n”