Employing Blockchain and Physical Unclonable Functions for Counterfeit IoT Devices Detection

Counterfeit copycat devices have become one of the most important problems in IoT ecosystem. The number of IoT devices manufactured has grown exponentially through last years. In order to be competitive in terms of production cost, they usually need to assemble devices by using ready components built by other manufacturers. This scheme results in a high risk that produced IoT devices do not function properly due to malfunctioning components. This can either be related to component manufacturers trying to minimize costs or even to malicious practices for violating privacy or security of end users of such devices. In this paper a novel approach for preventing such counterfeit copycat practices is presented. The proposed methodology is based on identifying each one of the used components through the use of PUF responses and employing blockchain technology, in order to set-up a platform for tracking the supply chain of both component and IoT devices, without requiring the existence of any central authority.