Design of a piezoelectric-based physically unclonable function for IoT security

According to a report from McAfee and the center for strategic and international studies, worldwide financial loss due to cybercrime was estimated to be $600 billion in 2017. Researchers are currently exploring new methods for preventing cybercrime in Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) show promise as a device that could help in the fight against cybercrime. PUFs are a class of circuit that are unique and unclonable due to inherent variations caused by the device manufacturing process. We can take advantage of these PUF properties by using the outputs of PUFs to generate secret keys or pseudonyms that are similarly unique and unclonable. In recent years, energy harvesting devices, such as piezoelectric devices have been integrated with IoT devices for various purposes such as power generation and sensing applications. In this paper we propose a PUF design based on piezo sensors which are already commonly found in IoT devices. Our proposed PUF is tested in terms of reliability and uniformity.