Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) to Secure Data and Detect Corruption

Description

This technology uses physical unclonable functions (PUFs) to mitigate data corruption resulting from malicious attacks, software bugs, or harsh environments. A technique is implemented to provide redundant data that cannot be predicted by an attacker, with the redundant data being generated in such a way that it differs from chip to chip. The main principle relies on data storage in addition to the functional, sensitive data, a tamper-proof tag uniquely linked to the sensitive data and the chip. The tamper-proof tag is a PUF response to a challenge, dependent on the data to be stored. Both the sensitive data and the tag are stored in the memory, next to each other. When the computing unit loads (reads back) the data, the PUF is concurrently challenged. At this time, the associated tag and data are compared and send an alarm if corruption is detected.

Additional information