Modeling arbiter-PUF in NodeMCU ESP8266 using artificial neural network

Abstract

A hardware fingerprinting primitive known as physical unclonable function (PUF) has a huge potential for secret-key cryptography and identification/authentication applications. The hardware fingerprint is manifested by the random and unique binary strings extracted from the integrated circuit (IC) which exist due to inherent process variations during its fabrication. PUF technology has a huge potential to be used for device identification and authentication in resource-constrained internet of things (IoT) applications such as wireless sensor networks (WSN). A secret computational model of PUF is suggested to be stored in the verifier’s database as an alternative to challenge and response pairs (CRPs) to reduce area consumption. Therefore, in this paper, the design steps to build a PUF model in NodeMCU ESP8266 using an artificial neural network (ANN) are presented. Arbiter-PUF is used in our study and NodeMCU ESP8266 is chosen because it is suitable to be used as a sensor node or sink in WSN applications. ANN with a resilient back-propagation training algorithm is used as it can model the non-linearity with high accuracy. The results show that ANN can model the arbiter-PUF with approximately 99.5% prediction accuracy and the PUF model only consumes 309,889 bytes of memory space.