Verayo secures license to patented PUF Technology from MIT

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 23 March 2010, 17:33 IST
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San Jose: Verayo, a security and authentication solutions provider, announced its exclusive rights to U.S. patent number 7,681,103, titled "Reliable Generation of a Device-Specific Value," granted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. This fundamental patent covers, for example, reliable generation of silicon chip-unique values using Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) technology. Such chip-unique values can be used as dynamic, volatile secret keys for cryptographic operations. "This license to the issued patents is a significant milestone for moving this technology into various commercial applications in the security and authentication industry," said Dr. Srini Devadas, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and CTO and Co-founder at Verayo. PUF-based key generation significantly elevates security and trust in cryptography-based solutions. Current state-of-the-art cryptography is based on keys that are typically stored on-chip. These keys are then used to authenticate and encrypt sessions for various applications such as identification, access control or financial transactions. With PUFs, such cryptographic solutions can provide a higher level of security and trust by dynamically generating chip-unique (or shared) volatile, though robust/reproducible, cryptographic keys, instead of storing and securing these keys. Additionally, a PUF-based cryptography solution can generate multiple, volatile secret root master keys even after being deployed in the field. This allows PUF-based cryptography solutions to renew root master keys in the field or support multiple vendors, features and functions.