A Novel Integrity Protocol Based on Physical Unclonable Functions

Ensuring data security in Internet of Things (IoT) networks is a major challenge due to the limited computational resources and energy constraints of these devices. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are hardware-based security tools that can provide unique identification for lightweight devices, making PUFs ideal for IoT applications. While PUFs have traditionally been used for authentication, in this paper, we propose a novel PUF protocol that can provide data integrity. Maintaining data integrity is crucial in many applications, including finance, healthcare, and energy. The proposed integrity based-PUF protocol is especially suitable for power constraint devices as it offers low computational overhead, execution time, and efficient communication overhead. In addition, we introduce a threat model called Physically Active Attack (PAA), a security requirement called Integrity Preserving (IP), to provide a comprehensive range of attacks and security goals specific to the context of our protocol. We then formally prove that our protocol preserves IP under PAA. We show that our proposed protocol is resistant to various attacks, including replay attacks, Man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM), cloning, brute force attacks, and physical attacks.