Lightweight PUF Authentication Protocol with NLFSR-Based Obfuscation

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) can be used for device authentication and key generation, leveraging the unique characteristics inherent to individual devices. Collecting multiple Challenge Response Pairs (CRPs) of PUF enable an attacker to conduct a modeling attack. If an attacker snoops on the authentication conversation between the server and the device, PUF is vulnerable to this type of attack. The security solutions that have been proposed based on PUF authentication are considered secure, but they often have a large hardware overhead, making them unsuitable for embedding in resource-constrained devices. In this paper, a lightweight and reliable PUF-based authentication scheme is proposed to protect sensitive CRP data, which uses a nonlinear feedback shift register (NLFSR) to obfuscate the original response to prevent attackers from collecting CRP in open channel to model PUF. The proposed scheme is demonstrated to be effectively resistant to various attacks, including brute force, impersonation, and replay. The prototype of this scheme has been implemented on the Artix-7 FPGA, with a PC serving as the server. The proposed scheme provides a search space and security level that are almost identical to symmetric cipher. Compared to the related work, the average LUT and FF required were decreased by $\mathbf{5 3 \%}$ and $\mathbf{7 5 \%}$, respectively.