Success at CSAW Europe 2023: Innovative PUF-based Security Solutions

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We are pleased to share our recent participation in the Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) Europe 2023. This event was organized by Grenoble INP and took place in Valence, France. CSAW aims to promote awareness, expertise, and innovation in the field of cybersecurity. The event includes guest lectures from industry and academia, as well as various cybersecurity competitions. CSAW Europe hosted the 'PUF Enabled Security Challenge' (PSC) for the first time and another hardware security competition. Our participation in the PSC aimed to present innovative PUF-based security solutions to an expert panel. These solutions were designed to address threats to modern IoT systems, from hardware attacks to system-level challenges, including hardware attack detection, key distribution, and support for secure computing. Once our proposal was accepted, we prepared a poster showcasing our novel work on a PUF-based Symbiotic Key Management System. We explained the process of extracting an initial set of entropy (randomness) and securely injecting it into firmware at the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) level. This entropy was then transported to end devices and extracted there by a specialized hardware "entropy extractor" on a RISC-V processor. Upon arrival at the device, this entropy source was combined with just-in-time PUF entropy to form a final "pool" of entropy for deriving fresh keys. These keys were symbiotically bound to both the end device and the original entropy source in the firmware. We presented our experimental results on a Zynq-7000 SoC FPGA (Digilent Zedboard). For our work, we achieved second place and received an award of €300. This recognition underscores our commitment to innovative solutions in the field of cybersecurity. This success motivates us to continue our research and development efforts in this important domain.