Abstract
Digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) play an important role in the healthcare industry due to its advantages such as low-cost, portability, and efficiency. According to the recent market report, the growth of biochips market is twice than before. However, as the enormous business opportunities grow, piracy attacks, which are exploited by unscrupulous people to gain illegal profits, become a severe threat to DMFBs. To prevent piracy attacks, the conventional approach uses secret keys to perform authentication. Nevertheless, DMFBs only consist of electrodes to control the operations of droplets, and there are no memories and logic gates integrated on it to store secret keys. This makes designing secure defenses of DMFBs against piracy attacks more dicult. Thus, in this thesis, we propose the first authentication method for piracy prevention of DMFBs based on a novel Physical Unclonable Function (PUF). The proposed PUF utilizes the inherent variation of electrodes on DMFBs to generate secret keys, so it does not require memory. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed PUF. Finally, we analyze the security of the proposed method against piracy attacks.