Photovoltaic Based Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) for Vehicular Security

Latest vehicles have about 100 million lines of code and 60 control units. Further, these modern vehicles have IoT (Internet of Things) enabled technologies such as power and infotainment systems, remote locking and unlocking, and remote engine start, etc. The United States Department of Transportation (DoT) is planning to include vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications technology in the new cars. This feature is going to provide 360-degree situational awareness on the road and will increase the vehicle safety. Vehicles are susceptible to malicious cyber-attacks. Thus, vehicular security is a critical consideration today, reaching the extent that popular news about vehicular vulnerabilities are capturing regular public attention. This is only bound to get worse with the manifold use of IoT devices in a vehicular network. Few of the examples of the attacks in the automotive domain can be modifying the in- vehicle system infrastructure, stealing intellectual property (IP), vehicle's theft, misusing the vehicle-to-road-to-vehicle infrastructure. Therefore, fundamental advancements are needed to create a security infrastructure, particularly in the form of new capabilities and support at the hardware and software level. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have evolved as one of the popular hardware security primitives for low cost, mass produced embedded devices with very constrained resources (very small volatile and persistent memory, low processor power). Therefore, the PI in collaboration with Dr. Stacy Prowell, Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Vehicle Security Center, plans to investigate new designs of photovoltaic PUFs based on electrical characteristics of photovoltaic cells for vehicular security. The vehicular security based on photovoltaic based PUFs has the potential to seal multiple types of vulnerabilities in vehicles specifically in the security classes of authentication, non-repudiation, and privacy.