Globally verifiable clone-resistant device identity with mutual authentication

One essential security requirement for building solid system security infrastructure is to have all relevant units securely identified and unclonable. In this work we introduce a further extension for the recently introduced bio-inspired e-DNA technology to realize a practical clone-resistant identity for electronic devices. In difference to the costly, relatively inconsistent physical unclonable functions PUFs which deploy physical unclonable properties, the proposed e-DNA is only practically clone-resistant. The proposed identification technique is more reliable in reproducing identity than that of the PUFpsilas structure. In contrary to PUFpsilas with their non-practical voltage and temperature sensitive properties, the proposed technique uses usual reproducible properties. The infeasibility of cloning the proposed evolving e-DNA structures relies on the extreme difficulty to follow-up the evolving/living a secret unknown identity marker which is seen as an e-DNA. The marker is hard to trace as it is unknown to anybody and unreadable. It is made time variant and thus practically hard to trace in a real world application. The paper demonstrates a sample scenario with mechanisms for creating and managing such living and evolving identity. System units can be mutually identified in a global environment by using relatively low-cost secret key cryptographic techniques. The central trusted authority can manage a dynamic number of units and resolve successful attacks efficiently.