Publication Date
3-1-2021
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Cryptography
Volume
5
Issue
1
DOI
10.3390/cryptography5010007
First Page
1
Last Page
29
Abstract
Over the last two decades, hardware security has gained increasing attention in academia and industry. Flash memory has been given a spotlight in recent years, with the question of whether or not it can prove useful in a security role. Because of inherent process variation in the characteristics of flash memory modules, they can provide a unique fingerprint for a device and have thus been proposed as locations for hardware security primitives. These primitives include physical unclonable functions (PUFs), true random number generators (TRNGs), and integrated circuit (IC) counterfeit detection. In this paper, we evaluate the efficacy of flash memory-based security primitives and categorize them based on the process variations they exploit, as well as other features. We also compare and evaluate flash-based security primitives in order to identify drawbacks and essential design considerations. Finally, we describe new directions, challenges of research, and possible security vulnerabilities for flash-based security primitives that we believe would benefit from further exploration.
Keywords
Flash memory, Flash-based physical unclonable function, Hardware security primitives, Integrated circuit counterfeit detection, Physical unclonable function (PUF), Survey, True random number generator (TRNG)
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Department
Computer Engineering
Recommended Citation
Holden Gordon, Jack Edmonds, Soroor Ghandali, Wei Yan, Nima Karimian, and Fatemeh Tehranipoor. "Flash-based security primitives: Evolution, challenges and future directions" Cryptography (2021): 1-29. https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography5010007
