PUF-Based Key Distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) can be seen as kind of hardware oneway functions, who are easily fabricated but difficult to clone, duplicate or predict.Therefore, PUFs with unclonable and unpredictable properties are welcome to be appliedin designing lightweight cryptography protocols. In this paper, a Basic Key Distribution Scheme (Basic-KDS) based on PUFs is firstly proposed. Then, by employing different deployment modes, a Random Deployment Key Distribution Scheme (RD-KDS) and a Grouping Deployment Key Distribution Scheme (GD-KDS) are further proposed based on the Basic-KDS for large scale wireless sensor networks. In our proposals, a sensor is not pre-distributed with any keys but will generate one by the embedded PUF when receiving a challenge from the gateway, which provides perfect resilience against sensor capture attacks. Besides, the unclonable and unpredictable properties of PUF guarantee the key uniqueness and two-way authentication. Analysis and experiment results show that our proposals have better performances in improving the resilience, secureconnectivity, and efficiency as compared to other schemes.