GRAPHENE FIELD EFFECT TRANSISTORS FOR PHYSICALLY UNCLONABLE CRYPTOGRAPHIC PRIMITIVES
Open Access
- Author:
- Buzzell, Drew
- Graduate Program:
- Engineering Science
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- April 15, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Saptarshi Das, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Mark William Horn, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Graphene
Cryptography
Physically Unconable Functions - Abstract:
- Graphene-based devices and sensors are emerging rapidly over the past decade owing to its unique and fascinating electronic and optoelectronic properties [1-5]. In fact, graphene based wearable sensors and heath monitoring devices can revolutionize emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT). A critical aspect of IoT edge and end devices is their interconnectivity at a global scale [6, 7]. As such the digital information that are generated, stored or communicated by these IoT devices can becomes vulnerable to cyber-attacks, tampering, hacking, and other security threats [8, 9]. It is imperative that these devices must be made secure against any digital crimes. Here we introduce an on-chip security method for generating physically unclonable challenge response pairs (CRPs) by exploiting the inherent disorders associated with the carrier transport in grain boundary dominated graphene field effect transistors (GFETs). To demonstrate the robustness and strength of the CRP, we employed various statistical measures including hamming distance, correlation coefficient, and entropy calculations. Our results showcase that the GFET based cryptographic primitives are uncorrelated, unclonable, and astronomically difficult to decipher using brute force trials (BFTs) facilitating their use as on-chip secure key generation. Finally, we developed a method for generating a new set of CRP by reconfiguring the GFET arrays that do not involve physical replacement of the devices and/or integration of additional hardware components.