PUFchain: Hardware-Assisted Blockchain for Sustainable Simultaneous Device and Data Security in the Internet of Everything (IoE)

This article presents the first-ever blockchain which can simultaneously handle device and data security, which is important for the emerging Internet-of-Everything (IoE). This article presents a unique concept of blockchain that integrates hardware security primitives called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) to solve scalability, latency, and energy requirement challenges and is called PUFchain. Data management and security (and privacy) of data, devices, and individuals, are some of the issues in the IoE architectures that need to be resolved. Integrating the blockchain into the IoE environment can help solve these issues and helps in the aspects of data storage and security. This article introduces a new blockchain architecture called PUFchain and introduces a new consensus algorithm called "Proof of PUF-Enabled Authentication" (PoP) for deployment in PUFchain. The proposed PoP is the PUF integration into our previously proposed Proof-of-Authentication (PoAh) consensus algorithm and can be called "Hardware-Assisted Proof-of-Authentication (HA-PoAh)". However, PUF integration is possible in the existing and new consensus algorithms. PoP utilizes PUFs which are responsible for generating a unique key that cannot be cloned and hence provide the highest level of security. A PUF uses the nanoelectronic manufacturing variations that are introduced during the fabrication of an integrated circuit to generate the keys. Hence, once generated from a PUF module, the keys cannot be cloned or generated from any other module. PUFchain uses a PUF and Hashing module which performs the necessary cryptographic functions. Hence the mining process is offloaded to the hardware module which reduces the processing times. PoP is approximately 1,000X faster than the well-established Proof-of-Work (PoW) and 5X faster than Proof-of-Authentication (PoAh).