Security and Complexity Bounds of SUC-Based Physical Identity

Secret Unknown Ciphers (SUCs) were proposed recently as promising alternative physical security anchors to counteract weaknesses of the traditional analog Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). SUC was introduced by the authors as a promising new clone-resistant physical identity in future smart applications. This work investigates the theoretical security bounds attained when “SUC-Based KeyGeneration” is deployed for key generation protocols. It is shown that “SUC-Based Key Generation” exhibits better security bounds compared with the traditional “PUF-Based” key-generation. Furthermore, it is shown that identification protocols for SUC-based-tokens exhibits less time and space complexities under the same operating conditions. Therefore, SUC-based physically clone-resistant digital devices are expected to become better choices in future System on Chip SoC solutions when self-reconfiguring non-volatile SoC FPGA technologies become available.