Comparison of Quantum PUF models

TL;DR

This paper compares various quantum PUF models, highlighting their potential for secure authentication and cryptography, and introduces a quantum token authentication simulator to evaluate multi-factor security protocols.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of quantum PUF approaches and presents requirements for a new quantum token authentication simulator.

Findings

Different quantum PUF models exhibit varying levels of security and robustness.

The QTOKSim simulator effectively tests quantum token-based authentication protocols.

Quantum PUFs could enhance security against quantum computing threats.

Abstract

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are hardware structures in a physical system (e.g. semiconductor, crystals etc.) that are used to enable unique identification of the semiconductor or to secure keys for cryptographic processes. A PUF thus generates a noisy secret reproducible at runtime. This secret can either be used to authenticate the chip, or it is available as a cryptographic key after removing the noise. Latest advancements in the field of quantum hardware, in some cases claiming to achieve quantum supremacy, highly target the fragility of current RSA type classical cryptosystems. As a solution, one would like to develop Quantum PUFs to mitigate such problem. There are several approaches for this technology. In our work we compare these different approaches and introduce the requirements for QTOKSim, a quantum token based authentication simulator testing its performance on a multi-factor authentication protocol.