User Authentication via PRNU-Based Physical Unclonable Functions

Multifactor user authentication systems enhance security by augmenting passwords with the verification of additional pieces of information such as the possession of a particular device. This paper presents an innovative user authentication scheme that verifies the possession of one’s smartphone by uniquely identifying its camera. High-frequency components of the photo-response nonuniformity of the optical sensor are extracted from raw images and used as a weak physical unclonable function. A novel scheme for efficient transmission and server-side verification is also designed based on adaptive random projections and on an innovative fuzzy extractor using polar codes. The security of the system is thoroughly analyzed under different attack scenarios both theoretically and experimentally.