Ensuring End-to-End Security in Computing Continuum Exploiting Physical Unclonable Functions

In recent years, there has been an increase in Cloud Continuum adoption to support Internet of Things applications. Inevitably, such a paradigm introduces novel security challenges, particularly concerning the security of communicating nodes to prevent malicious actors from tampering within the network, and ensuring the confidentiality of sensitive data during transmissions. Traditional security methods often fall short in addressing these issues, especially where network nodes are built upon resource-constrained devices. Consequently, the scientific community has begun exploring the potential of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), which are unique digital identifiers derived from the inherent variability in the manufacturing process of integrated circuits, as a means to enhance security mechanisms at minimal overhead cost. This paper introduces Secure-PHEMAP (S-PHEMAP), a novel and lightweight PUF-based key management scheme designed for end-to-end communications that guarantees authenticity, confidentiality and integrity for pair communications. The proposed scheme builds upon the PHEMAP protocols, inheriting its security properties. S-PHEMAP can be employed in scenarios where both communicating devices embeds a PUF or in situations where only one of them has a PUF. In addition, the paper includes a deployment strategy in a Cloud Continuum domain, by leveraging the Chef automation framework.