On January 9, Tsinghua News Network reported that with the rapid proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), edge devices face novel security challenges in local data processing, necessitating lightweight yet highly dependable security solutions. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), an emerging hardware security mechanism, harness variations in chip manufacturing processes and device randomness to transform input challenge vectors into unique and unpredictable response vectors, thereby furnishing secure keys for cryptographic applications. Notably, strong PUFs boast an exponentially vast challenge-response pair space, enabling support for advanced encryption protocols such as device authentication and multi-party computation. Nonetheless, current strong PUFs primarily rely on device process variations, necessitating further research and development to bolster security and practicality.
