Shariati, Saloomeh
[UCL]
(eng)
Physical Unclonable Functions or PUFs have gained importance since they appeared about a decade ago.
PUFs are based on physical random features that can serve as primitives in designing security systems similarly to human biometrics.
The basic idea of using random features for security applications seems very interesting since the randomness is there for free. However, it raises some important research questions to be studied. The first important question is that ``how good are PUFs?'' or in other words ``what are our expectations from them and how can we experimentally validate these expectations?''. The second question rising after evaluating the expected properties is that ``how can we connect these physical entities to secure systems?'' or ``how cryptographic primitives can be used to fill the gap between physics and secure systems?''.
This dissertation tries to address these two main questions for a specific category of PUFs which are called Image-based PUFs and a particular secure system i.e., anti-counterfeiting. Image-based PUFs represent a category of PUFs based on random visual features of physical objects evaluated by an imaging method.
The first part of the thesis is dedicated to build a unified model to deal with Image-based PUFs. The model includes all the procedures needed to evaluate and post-process the images taken from Image-based PUFs. We also provide practical implementations of system components.
For example we introduce two new types of Image-based PUFs called Laser-written PUF and Crystal PUF.
The relevance of the framework is further demonstrated by its accordance to these examples of Image-based PUFs.
We also present two practical adaptive and non-adaptive image hashing methods called Gabor Binary Hashing and Random Binary Hashing.
After building the model and instantiating its components, the second part of this thesis tries to address the first question i.e., ``how good are PUFs?''. For that, we experimentally characterize the important properties of Image-based PUFs i.e., robustness and physical unclonability. We build datasets of some PUFs which are evaluated a number of times, and based on that, we propose a methodology to experimentally evaluate robustness and physical unclonability. We finally achieve the main interesting property of the PUF system that is the trade-off between robustness and physical unclonability.
After evaluating how good PUFs are, to address the second question, we try to connect PUFs to a secure system. For that, we focus on development of an anti-counterfeiting scheme based on Image-based PUFs and use formal cryptographic analysis to connect the security of the scheme to the evaluated properties of its underlying PUF.


Bibliographic reference |
Shariati, Saloomeh. Image-based physical unclonable functions for anti-counterfeiting. Prom. : Standaert, Francois-Xavier ; Macq, Benoit |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/124681 |