First, many IoT devices have limited processing power and memory, yet robust cryptography involves substantial computational power and needs memory to store temporary or permanent encryption keys.
One solution is to give every IoT device a unique and unclonable identifier by deriving it from the microscopic physical differences between silicon chips caused by manufacturing process variations across a wafer. Such an identifier can substitute for stored encryption keys, saving memory.
IoT devices with unique identifiers can communicate securely with cloud-based servers that carry out data analysis and decision-making within IoT ecosystems. However, it is critical that devices and servers can authenticate that they are communicating with legitimate members of their ecosystem. This is usually handled using digital signatures and public key infrastructure.
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Electronic sensors can benefit many industrial applications, such as automotive engineering. But they have to be protected from attacks and falsifications. The new joint project “sensIC”aims to integrate printed electronics and silicon components directly into products in order to secure sensors. At the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), researchers are developing a central component for this: printed safety circuits with special hardware-based functions, so-called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). The Federal Ministry of Research is funding sensIC with a total of 2.9 million euros. The industrial partners are investing a further 1.35 million euros in the project.
In electrically powered vehicles, they monitor the temperature of the batteries in order to optimize their service life and performance; in plants in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, they monitor the operating status of passive components in order to detect errors immediately: Electronic sen