PGP-Key / PGP-Key (local)
PGP-Fingerprint: 914D B932 F365 7310 949F 5FF4 B163 91DD 14B2 7AF2

Currently, I'm a research assistant at the chair of computer engineering at the University of Passau. I'm part of the PUFMem project. Within this project, I do research on hardware trust anchors within new types of non-volatile memories like FRAM, MRAM, or ReRAM. Additionally, I investigate electronic circuit elements like Memristors or CNT FETs.

• Physical Unclonable Functions
• Hardware Security
• IT-Security in Nanomaterialien
• Field-Programmable Gate Arrays
• Automotive Security

WiSe21/22

5767UE Exercises: Hardware-oriented Security
5766S Seminar: Masterseminar Security Engineering

SoSe21 

5766S Seminar: Masterseminar Security Engineering
5764 Exercises: Advanced Security Engineering Lab

WiSe20/21 

5766S Seminar: Master Seminar Security Engineering
5767UE Exercises: Hardware-oriented Security

SoSe22 

5204UE Exercises: Rechnerarchitekturen

If you are interested in a thesis in the domain of hardware security or Physical Unclonable Functions please write me an e-mail on 

Florian.Frank@uni-passau.de.

There exists a detailed task description for each of the below mentioned theses. Just send me a message to request a full description. 

Open topics:

It was shown that changing the read and write latency when reading or writing to memory modules like DRAM could be used to generate physical „fingerprints“. These fingerprints are based on the unique pattern caused by the latency variations, which results in certain cells being correctly read or written, and other cells, which return incorrect results. The goal of this thesis is to reproduce such „fingerprints“ on new memory technologies like FRAM, ReRAM, or MRAM and use them in key exchange algorithms or authentication protocols. 

Memristors are passive circuit elements, which gained particular attention in recent years because they can be used as non-volatile memory cells. They have advantages in energy consumption and allow a high degree of memory density, and thus could be a prominent successor of established memory technologies like Flash, SRAM, or DRAM. The goal of this thesis is to analyze the electrical characteristics of such devices and to generate PUF constructions using the observed characteristics. The construction should generate unique and secure keys which can be used in various security protocols.

In this topic, side-effects on non-volatile memories caused, for example, by a variation of the write latency or by changing the supply voltage of memories like MRAM, FRAM and ReRAM are exploited to generate cryptographic secure true random numbers. By choosing this topic you will first analyze raw measurements according to their entropy. Based on this analysis you will develop procedures to improve the entropy to generate cryptographically secure keys.