Author

Yuan Liu

Document Type

Thesis

College

College of Engineering

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Degree

MSE in Electrical Engineering

Date Completed

2018

First Committee Member

Zhou, Ruolin

Second Committee Member

Rahnamai, Kourosh

Third Committee Member

Li, Zhaojun

Abstract

"IoT (Internet of Things) connects objects/things through a network to collect data and exchange information between different Internet-enabled objects or systems. All these “things” are basically the embedded system with sensors and communication capability through wired or wireless technologies. Currently, manufacturers are designing smart prod- ucts by using embedded devices powered by software to add new features and smart capa- bilities. By patching more and more software, the products become vulnerable to security attacks. Meanwhile, as mentioned by Intel, the number of Internet connected devices will increase from 15 billion to 200 billion by 2020. The dramatic growth is not driven by the increase of human population, but by the vast growth of IoT devices. Therefore, se- curity becomes a significant challenge of designing the IoT system. Due to the limited host processor computation power, we implement the IoT device on System-on-Chip Field Programmable Gate Array (SoC-FPGA) which integrates flexible software and high per- formance hardware. Moreover, the SoC-FPGA based design can be re-programmed and re-configured in real-time, protected and secured through bitstream encryption from bit- stream decoding as well as through bitstream authentication to avoid spoofing and Trojan Horse attacks. On the other hand, the unique features of FPGA can be used to generate unique keys for encryption. Specifically, PUF circuit design takes advantage of the fact that during the fabrication process, there will always exist some variation between the physical properties. Similar to a fingerprint, for every individual FPGA the PUF circuit will produce a repeat- able key that is also unique to one generated on another board of the same make. The specific design used is called a Ring Oscillator PUF design (ROPUF) because the physical characteristics it utilizes are the propagation delays of the inverter gates on the FPGA. In this thesis, we implement PUF on Altera DE2-115 FPGA to obtain a unique and unclon- able key to encrypt the public and private keys of Secure Shell (SSH) where is the secure ii communication link between a remote user and an IoT device. The reliability of the PUF key generation has been tested under different circumstances. It is stable in room tempera- ture. On the same FPGA board, the key is repeatable; however, on different FPGA boards, different keys are generated."

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