Cross-Layer Roots of Trust: Integrating Biometrics, PUFs, and Hardware Obfuscation

Abstract

Modern cyber--physical, Internet-of-Things (IoT), wearable, and edge systems increasingly require trust in three distinct entities: the human requesting access, the physical device executing the computation, and the hardware function that is permitted to operate. These requirements are usually studied in separate communities. Biometrics establish human identity but remain vulnerable to presentation attacks, intra-user variability, template leakage, and limited revocability. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) provide device-specific physical identity and on-demand secret derivation, yet must address environmental instability, helper-data exposure, side channels, and modeling attacks. Hardware obfuscation and logic locking condition correct circuit behavior on an activation secret, but face oracle-guided, approximate, structural, removal, and physical attacks. This survey develops a unified human--device--function view of trust. We first decompose each primitive into its complete processing chain and identify the corresponding security assumptions, implementation mechanisms, and evaluation metrics. We then formalize pairwise compositions---biometric--PUF, PUF--obfuscation, and biometric--obfuscation---and a three-way architecture in which correct functionality is bound jointly to an authorized user and a genuine device. Particular attention is given to biometric key reconstruction, PUF stabilization and modeling resistance, logic-locking attack evaluation, cross-layer error propagation, enrollment trust, key lifecycle, and interface leakage. The survey concludes with a taxonomy and research agenda for revocable human--device credentials, compositional security, leakage-aware integration, reconfigurable activation, and standardized end-to-end evaluation.