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This paper introduces a software-hardware binding technique to protect sensitive data in embedded systems by leveraging hardware fingerprints derived from a physically unclonable function (PUF) based on SRAM. The method ensures that unauthorized copies of the software run suboptimally on cloned devices, protecting intellectual property without requiring additional hardware. The security evaluation suggests that only complex dynamic analysis on the genuine device can reveal the secret data, making the protection difficult to bypass.
Protect your embedded system IP: this novel software-hardware binding makes unauthorized copies run suboptimally, requiring attackers to perform complex dynamic analysis on the genuine device to extract sensitive data.
Embedded software used in industrial systems frequently relies on data that ensures the correct and efficient operation of these systems. Thus, companies invest considerable resources in fine-tuning this data, making it their valuable intellectual property (IP). We present a novel protection mechanism for this IP that combines hardware fingerprints with Boolean logic. Unlike usual copy-protection approaches, unauthorised copies of the software still run on cloned devices but suboptimally. According to our security evaluation, only a complex dynamic analysis of the protected software running on the genuine target device can reveal the secret data. This makes the protection offered by our method more difficult to bypass. Notably, our approach does not require additional hardware, relying only on relatively simple updates to the software. We evaluate our protection mechanism by binding the parameters of a PID controller to a microcontroller unit (MCU) by using a physically unclonable function (PUF) based on its SRAM.
