"Human-to-Machine" authentication is widely developed for modern telecommunications. A "Machine-to-Human" authentication will ensure the trusted human user about the integrity of the machine, for example during an electronic voting session or object verification in secure traceability. This work is focused on secure traceability without any systematic access to a communication network. We depict different technics for goods authentication and we focus on a method based on the characterization of printed patterns. To completely authenticate an object, we show that a human verifier has to be confident in the integrity of the third party and the electronic system involved in the verification phase. However, the authenticity of the electronic system itself has also to be verified. We address here the following question : how a human being can convince himself about the integrity and the authenticity of an embedded system in an off-line environment ? We propose two groups of solutions. In the first one, an auxiliary electronic device is used to perform computing operations. In the second one, the human capability (memory and computational abilities) is exploited. In each group, we propose a protocol to authenticate embedded systems for which the chip (typically an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) or a microcontroller) is initialized according to the configuration or programming of its RAM memory
Embedded and secure traceability : autonomous authentication of objects and of embedded systems