A Reverse-Engineering Assessment of a Secure Authenticator with PUF Technology

From fault injection to side-channel analysis and invasive techniques, cybercriminals continue to become more sophisticated in their attack methods that are applied to security ICs. With pervasive connectivity and the resulting exposure, hardware-based security provides the most effective solution for protecting the assets of embedded systems. The newest embedded security ICs feature the most advanced level of protection against invasive attacks currently available: the physically unclonable function (PUF). This paper provides the findings of a reverse-engineering study conducted by a third-party security lab to evaluate the security robustness of Maxim’s secure authenticator with ChipDNA™ PUF technology.