Authentication method using the variation of power generation time in energy harvester and its evaluation

ABSTRACT Although internet of things technology is widely used in various fields, internet of things has several issues such as energy efficiency and authentication for security. The energy harvesting technology, which harvests various energy (eg, sunlight, vibration, electromagnetic wave, and so on), and converts them to electric power, has attracted attention for the solving method for the first problem. Moreover, the physical unclonable function, which uses variances of semiconductor manufacturing variations for authentication, has attracted attention for the solving method for the other problem. This study proposes a new authentication method for energy harvester. The proposed method utilizes the difference in power generation time due to manufacturing variations for the device authentication. In addition, the proposed method can be realized in very low cost because it does not require a dedicated physical unclonable function circuit. Several experiments using an actual energy harvester verify the validity of the proposed method.