Browsing by Author "Mosavi, Mohammad Reza"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

An efficient authentication protocol for smart grid communication based on on-chip-error-correcting physical unclonable function
(2023-12) Kaveh, Masoud; Mosavi, Mohammad Reza; Martín, Diego; Aghapour, Saeed
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
Security has become a main concern for the smart grid to move from research and development to industry. Central to this security paradigm is the concept of resistance to threats, whether emanating from an active adversary seeking to disrupt operations or a passive entity covertly intercepting sensitive data. In this dynamic landscape, smart meters (SMs) stand as the sentinels at the edge of the grid, silently gathering and transmitting invaluable data. Yet, this very placement often leaves them vulnerable in unprotected areas, underscoring the paramount importance of physical security in the smart grid. It is here that Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have emerged as a formidable ally. These unique constructs serve as guardians of physical security, leveraging the inherent unpredictability of manufacturing processes to create cryptographic keys. PUFs, however, are not without their own conundrums, primarily in the realm of reliability. This challenge has prevented their widespread integration into cryptographic applications. Fuzzy extractors have been considered as a solution to solve the reliability problem of PUFs, albeit at the cost of imposing significant computational burdens. To that end, we first propose an on-chip-error-correcting (OCEC) PUF that efficiently generates stable digits for the authentication process. Afterward, we introduce a lightweight authentication protocol between the SMs and neighborhood gateway (NG) based on the proposed PUF. The provable security analysis shows that not only the proposed protocol can stand secure in the Canetti–Krawczyk (CK) adversary model but also provides additional security features. Also, the performance evaluation demonstrates the significant improvement of the proposed scheme in comparison with the state-of-the-art.
EPUF: An Entropy-derived Latency-Based DRAM Physical Unclonable Function for Lightweight Authentication in Internet of Things
(2024-11-07) Najafi, Fatemeh; Kaveh, Masoud; Mosavi, Mohammad Reza; Brighente, Alessandro; Conti, Mauro
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are hardware-based mechanisms that exploit inherent manufacturing variations to generate unique identifiers for devices. Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) has emerged as a promising medium for implementing PUFs, providing a cost-effective solution without the need for additional circuitry. This makes DRAM PUFs ideal for use in resource-constrained environments such as Internet of Things (IoT) networks. However, current DRAM PUF implementations often either disrupt host system functions or produce unreliable responses due to environmental sensitivity. In this paper, we present EPUF, a novel approach to extracting random and unique features from DRAM cells to generate reliable PUF responses. We leverage bitmap images of binary DRAM values and their entropy features to enhance the robustness of our PUF. Through extensive real-world experiments, we demonstrate that EPUF is approximately 1.7 times faster than existing solutions, achieves 100% reliability, produces features with 47.79% uniqueness, and supports a substantial set of Challenge-Response Pairs (CRPs). These capabilities make EPUF a powerful tool for DRAM PUF-based authentication. Based on EPUF, we then propose a lightweight authentication protocol that not only offers superior security features but also surpasses state-of-the-art authentication schemes in terms of communication overhead and computational efficiency.
MCRO-PUF: A Novel Modified Crossover RO-PUF with an Ultra-Expanded CRP Space
(2023) Rabiei, Hassan; Kaveh, Masoud; Mosavi, Mohammad Reza; Martín, Diego
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
With the expanding use of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the connection of humans and devices to the Internet, the need to provide security in this field is constantly growing. The conventional cryptographic solutions need the IoT device to store secret keys in its non-volatile memory (NVM) leading the system to be vulnerable to physical attacks. In addition, they are not appropriate for IoT applications due to their complex calculations. Thus, physically unclonable functions (PUFs) have been introduced to simultaneously address these issues. PUFs are lightweight and easy-toaccess hardware security primitives which employ the unique characteristics of integrated circuits (ICs) to generate secret keys. Among all proposed PUFs, ring oscillator PUF (RO-PUF) has had amore suitable structure for hardware implementation because of its high reliability and easier providing of circuital symmetry. However, RO-PUF has not been so attractive for authentication purposes due to its limited supported challenge-response pairs (CRPs). A few efforts have been made in recent years that could successfully improve the RO-PUF CRP space, such as configurable RO-PUF (CRO-PUF). In this paper, by considerably improving the CRO-PUF structure and adding spare paths, we propose a novel strong RO-PUF structure that exponentially grows the CRP space and dramatically reduces the hardware cost. We implement our design on a simple and low-cost FPGA chip named XC6SLX9-2tqg144, stating that the proposed design can be used in IoT applications. In addition, to improve the CRP space, our design creates a suitable improvement in different security/performance terms of the generated responses, and dramatically outperforms the state-of-the-art. The average reliability, uniqueness, and uniformity of the responses generated are 99.55%, 48.49%, and 50.99%, respectively.