Publication

Abstract : At present, Blockchain is one of the biggest sought after research-oriented field that finds application in numerous areas including finance, cryptocurrency, asset management and so on. Blockchain is basically a public distributed database that holds the encrypted data. To ensure that each transaction is true and correct, the blocks are initially validated and then agreed upon by the user through a consensus mechanism like Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS) etc [57] [53]. The most commonly used consensus mechanism over the year is PoW, which involves the user to solve a computationally hard puzzle. But, the problem with this traditional consensus mechanism is that the whole process is power and resource hungry and requires a considerable amount of time for the computation. This huge requirement can be reduced considerably by replacing these algorithms with certain hardware primitives without even compromising on the correctness, security and trust features. This project work focuses on providing a viable replacement to the authentication/ validation and mining part of the existing Consensus algorithm. This work make use of a Ring Oscillator PUF (ROPUF) for authenticating the identity of user and a reconfigurable LFSR for doing the mining function. This is a research attempt to study on how hardware primitives can be used as a substitute to the power and resource hungry mechanisms currently in use. This aims at reducing the burden on hefty software by leveraging the advantages of cost effective hardware primitives.