Verayo, a security and authentication technology provider, recently introduced security solutions based on "unclonable" silicon chips. The core technology that makes these silicon chips unclonable is called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF). PUF 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.
Verayo's authentication solutions exploit the electronic DNA of silicon chips to authenticate them, and can be easily integrated into many kinds of silicon chips, as complex as microprocessors, FPGAs, ASICs, smart cards, as well as simple passive RFID. These solutions provide strong and robust authentication of electronic equipment, luxury brand products, pharmaceuticals, secure IDs, passports and documents.
Conventional security solutions require storing of keys on the silicon. 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 fingerprint of the silicon chips it dynamically generates a virtually unlimited number of secret keys. This significantly 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.
"PUF technology exploits the physical characteristics of the silicon and IC manufacturing process variations to uniquely characterize each and every silicon chip, this provides a secure, low-cost mechanism to authenticate silicon chips," said Professor Srini Devadas, co-founder and CTO of Verayo.
Verayo is introducing the world's first ever "unclonable" RFID chip at the RFID World conference in Las Vegas on September 9, 2008.
