Solar Cells Based Novel Physical Unclonable Functions for loT Devices

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have evolved as one of the popular hardware security primitives. PUFs are class of circuits that use the inherent variations in the Integrated Circuit (IC) manufacturing process to create unique and unclonable IDs. PUFs hold the potential to simplify or solve many important security problems such as such as IC piracy, IC counterfeiting, secure authentication and key management in the cyberphysical security. Further, object authentication is of utmost importance in businesses that are threatened by counterfeited devices. PUF can't be cloned or copied, and could be used to identify products unambiguously in order to avoid counterfeiting. PUF has the potential to seal multiple types of vulnerabilities specifically in the security classes of authentication, non-repudiation, and privacy. Literature reveals that existing PUFs either suffer from high power consumption or low challenge-response pair sets. Another issue is that environmental variations such as temperature could play a significant role in PUFs' reliability. To overcome these limitations of existing PUFs, this proposal will investigate new designs of PUFs in emerging computing paradigms such as new type of field effect transistors (FET) and materials such as FinFET, Carbon based FETs (carbon nanotube and graphene) and Tunnel FET, spin-based devices, etc. Currently, it is not clear which of these emerging computing paradigms would provide a secure, reliable and energy-efficient PUF, and secure hardware. Therefore, this proposal is an important initiative towards progress in that direction. Further, solar cells are used in a wide variety of applications such as electric fences, remote lighting system, water pumping, water treatment, emergency power, satellites. Fake solar cells/panel are on the rise, therefore through we plan to investigate one of the application of PUFs in the context of security, object authentication and counterfeiting in solar cell domain.