Electronic DNA enables unclonable RFID chips

Verayo, a security and authentication solutions provider, has launched what it claims is the world's first unclonable silicon chip.

The RFID chip is based on technology called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF). It is like a biometrics technology for silicon chips. It extracts a type of ‘electronic DNA or fingerprint’ that is unique to each silicon chip, and uses it for authentication and security applications.

It is effectively impossible to model or copy the electronic DNA in another chip, which makes PUF-based solutions more secure and robust. The company is marketing two broad categories of security solutions based on PUF technology — authentication and secret key generation.

Basic passive RFID chips can be easily cloned by copying the data residing on one chip to another. With PUF chips, no other chips or devices can be disguised as the original chip, even if the data is copied from one chip to another.

The company´s authentication solutions exploit the electronic DNA of silicon chips to authenticate them and can be easily integrated into many kinds of chips, such as microprocessors, FPGAs, ASICs, smart cards, as well as simple passive RFID devices. These provide strong and robust authentication of electronic equipment, luxury brand products, pharmaceuticals, secure IDs, passports and documents.

Conventional security solutions require storing keys on the silicon and the security of the entire system depends on the integrity of these stored keys. Verayo's key generation solution eliminates the need for stored keys.

Using unique electronic DNA or fingerprints of the silicon chips, it generates a virtually unlimited number of secret keys.

This enhances the security and flexibility of secure systems, such as smart cards, NFC cards, SIM cards, trusted processors commonly used for financial transactions, service provisioning and trusted computing.

"Counterfeiting is a major issue today. It cuts across geographies and industries, it is prevalent in both online and brick-n-mortar supply chains. These RFIDs provide a simple and effective way to end this growing problem," said Anant Agrawal, CEO of Verayo.

"RFID is expanding beyond identification to authentication and Verayo's silicon biometrics technology provides industries with an authentication solution relative to other technologies currently available."

"PUF technology exploits the physical characteristics of the silicon and IC manufacturing process variations to uniquely characterise each and every silicon chip. This provides a secure, low-cost mechanism to authenticate silicon chips," said Prof Srini Devadas, co-founder and CTO of Verayo.