Special session: How secure are PUFs really? On the reach and limits of recent PUF attacks

Just over a decade ago, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have been introduced as a new cryptographic and security primitive in a number of seminal publications. Due to their assumed security and cost advantages, they have attracted substantial attention both from the security industry and the academic community, and are also gaining ground in commercial applications. Nevertheless, a number of recent works have presented successful attacks on PUF core properties, such as their digital and physical unclonability. How strong and relevant are these attacks, and how secure are PUFs really? This question is addressed in a dedicated hot topic session at DATE 2014. This paper provides a short and easily accessible overview of the session.