A PUF seed generator for RIOT : introducing crypto-fundamentals to the wild

Abstract

In this work, we present a random seeder for the RIOT operating system based on PUFs. Following the RIOT dedication as a general-purpose IoT operating system, we design a generic PUF extractor based on SRAM memory which is available on most platforms. We design a module for RIOT that hooks into the OS startup code right before kernel initialization. The patterns of a preserved and uninitialized SRAM block are fed into a hash function to derive the desired seed value. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first recent embedded security primitive that has entered a commodity operating system.