Ultralightweight PUF-Based Authentication Protocol: Eliminating RNGs and Throttling for Enhanced Security

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are a promising technology that offers lightweight security for IoT devices. However, lightweight PUF-based solutions often throttle the device to prevent adversaries from collecting enough information that could compromise the device's security. Other solutions utilize cryptographic primitives or true random number generators to enhance the device's security. Moreover, implementing a True Random Number Generator (TRNG) on a small device can be impractical. Additionally, the device's environment can introduce external factors that may affect the randomness of the generated numbers. This work presents a novel, ultralightweight PUF-based authentication protocol that offers unlimited authentication and requires no cryptographic primitives or RNGs. The protocol utilizes challenge transformation and stores secret masks to hide the PUF output. A thorough security analysis is performed by testing the security against machine-learning-based attacks. The analysis results show that the protocol can attain high resilience against various threat models without using RNGs or throttling techniques.