Volume 8 - Issue 3
Physical Unclonable Functions based on silicon micro-ring resonators for secure signature delegation in Wireless Sensor Networks
- Borja Bordel
Department of Telematics Systems Engineering. Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
bbordel@dit.upm.es
- Ramon Alcarria
Department of Topographic Engineering and Cartography. Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
ramon.alcarria@upm.es
Keywords: Wireless Sensor Networks, Physical Unclonable Functions, Chaotic resonators, Digital signature, Automatic key generators
Abstract
With the arrival of the fourth industrial revolution and the era of Cyber-Physical Systems, Wireless
Sensor Networks (WSN) are employed in a large catalogue of applications, many of them critical.
At the beginning, encryption techniques were enough to protect WSN, but as more sophisticated
applications are proposed, protection schemes turn also more complex. In particular, schemes based
on digital signatures, hash functions and Public Key Infrastructures are extensively implemented.
Nevertheless, all these solutions present a very important problem: nodes must store a secret key. As
future systems will be unmanaged and be deployed in remote places without surveillance, the use of
ROM memories where keys are stored in a permanent way is a critical risk. Therefore, in this paper
we propose a new scheme for signature delegation in WSN, based on chaotic Physical Unclonable
Functions (PUF). As the size of nodes is an essential parameter to be considered, the proposed technology
is supported by micro-ring resonators. A simulation scenario is also defined to validate the
usability and performance of the proposed framework.