ZENITH Research and Leadership Career Fund Project 

The main aim of this project is to develop future-proof, low-cost, and universal methods for implementing provably secure and private digital devices for the sake of individuals’ and businesses’ safety, including the privacy of any sensitive data stored. For this aim, the network security and privacy primitives, called physical unclonable functions (PUFs), will be used to establish a holistic methodology that enables the production of future IoT devices with security and privacy guarantees for every device and every user to comply with, e.g., EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Sweden’s Data Protection Act (Dataskyddslagen). 

Recently, we have shown by using information-theoretic and signal-processing tools that current PUF products only provide security guarantees for the average case over all devices implemented, meaning that millions of intelligent IoT devices are likely vulnerable against malicious attacks. This ZENITH project aims to be a trigger for enhancing security and privacy in the digital domain by developing universal low-complexity methods based on joint design of quantizers and error correcting codes, such that an exact measure of security defined via mutual information and Shannon entropy terms can be provided by a manufacturer for every device. The project will bridge the gap between practical secrecy systems and the ultimate information-theoretic security limits, and it is expected to have a major impact on production of future intelligent devices together with the full support of the industrial partner Sectra Communications.