PUF technology could help tackle industrial piracy

Researchers from the Fraunhofer organisation in Germany have become the latest group to develop this method of protecting electronic components from multiple kinds of copying.

The technology could work for components found in plant engineering equipment, as well as chips on access cards such as for subscription TV services.

This could help tackle a counterfeiting problem that cost the German mechanical engineering sector €6.4bn (£5.4bn) last year, according to the German Engineering Federation (VDMA).

The team plans to unveil a prototype device at the Embedded World exhibition and conference in Nuremberg next month, following in the footsteps of Philips Research spin-out company Intrinsic ID, which is producing a similar technology.

‘At the moment the problem is you have specific counter-measures to protect against single attacks. It’s not a holistic approach,’ Dominik Merli, one of the scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, told The Engineer.

‘The other problem is if you have a key inside a device, it is stored in some way and maybe someone can extract it or read the key. The advantage of our system is the key is not present in the device. The secret is in the structure of the chip.’