Challenges and Opportunities of Physically Unclonable Functions Research

Abstract: A Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) is a unique and stable physical characteristic of a piece of computer hardware, which emerges due to variations in the fabrication processes. PUFs have become an important and promising hardware primitive for fingerprinting, authenticating, or storing cryptographic keys in computing devices. Research on PUFs aims to create or uncover devices or circuits that have the unique, stable, and unclonable characteristics so they can be used as PUFs. Challenges of PUFs research are in developing devices, protocols and applications (software). In the PUFs breakout sessions we will discuss these challenges further as well as opportunities that PUFs bring to computer security and brainstorm future of PUFs research.