Investigating the Impact of Low-Rate Error-Correction Codes on Device-Cloning and Reverse-Engineering Attacks on Physical Unclonable Functions

Securing Internet of Things (IoT) devices is important due to the rapid growth of smart devices and increasing demand for artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled functionality. However, IoT devices are often resource-constrained, making robust security measures challenging to implement. To address this issue, physical unclonable functions (PUFs) can be implemented on chips to generate device-specific signatures. Due to their lightweight structure, PUFs are suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices. However, PUFs are sensitive to environmental and operational variations, which can cause bit errors in the generated signatures and affect security applications. These errors can be corrected using error-correction codes (ECCs), enabling reliable signatures under varying conditions. This paper quantitatively investigates potential security risks associated with low-rate low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes in PUF-based applications. Two attack scenarios are analyzed using a modeled PUF. Our model-based results show that low-rate LDPC codes can significantly improve PUF reliability but may also introduce security risks. For the evaluated device-cloning attack scenario, the WiMAX LDPC code with a code rate of 1/2 and a soft-information length of K=288 resulted in a maximum success probability of 62.98% for reconstructing the secret response at an ambient temperature of 10 °C, demonstrating a potential security vulnerability for this configuration.