Protection of Sensitive Security Parameters in Integrated Circuits

  • Authors:
  • Dejan E. Lazich;Micaela Wuensche

  • Affiliations:
  • Micronas GmbH, Freiburg, D-79108;Institut fuer Algorithmen und Kognitive Systeme (IAKS), University of Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, D-76131

  • Venue:
  • Mathematical Methods in Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

To protect sensitive security parameters in the non-volatile memory of integrated circuits, a device is designed that generates a special secret key (called IC-Eigenkey) to symmetrically encrypt this data. The IC-Eigenkey is generated by the integrated circuit itself and therefore unknown to anybody else. The desired properties of such an IC-Eigenkey are postulated and a theoretical limit on the distribution of IC-Eigenkeys over an IC-production series is derived. The design of the IC-Eigenkey generator is based on silicon physical uncloneable functions. It exploits the marginal random variations of the propagation delays of gates and wires in an integrated circuit. A method is introduced that uses codewords of error control codes to configure the IC-Eigenkey generator in a way that the generated bits are as statistically independent of each other as possible.