A Compact and Low Power RO PUF with High Resilience to the EM Side-Channel Attack and the SVM Modelling Attack of Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Authentication is a crucial security service for the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in versatile domains. The deployment of WSN devices in the untrusted open environment and the resource-constrained nature make the on-chip authentication an open challenge. The strong physical unclonable function (PUF) came in handy as light-weight authentication security primitive. In this paper, we present the first ring oscillator (RO) based strong physical unclonable function (PUF) with high resilience to both the electromagnetic (EM) side-channel attack and the support vector machine (SVM) modelling attack. By employing an RO based PUF architecture with the current starved inverter as the delay cell, the oscillation power is significantly reduced to minimize the emitted EM signal, leading to greatly enhanced immunity to the EM side-channel analysis attack. In addition, featuring superior reconfigurability due to the conspicuously simplified circuitries, the proposed implementation is capable of withstanding the SVM modelling attack by generating and comparing a large number of RO frequency pairs. The reported experimental results validate the prototype of a 9-stage RO PUF fabricated using standard 65 nm complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process. Operating at the supply voltage of 1.2 V and the frequency of 100 KHz, the fabricated RO PUF occupies a compact silicon area of 250 µm 2 and consumes a power as low as 5.16 µW per challenge-response pair (CRP). Furthermore, the uniqueness and the worst-case reliability are measured to be 50.17% and 98.30% for the working temperature range of −40∼120 • C and the supply voltage variation of ±2%, respectively. Thus, the proposed PUF is applicable for the low power, low cost and secure WSN communications.

Single Trace Side Channel Analysis on NTRU Implementation

“…Therefore, there is a research on the physical unclonable function (PUF) as a light-weight authentication security primitive. For example, side-channel resistant PUF was intensively studied in [28].…”

Modelling Attack Analysis of Configurable Ring Oscillator (CRO) PUF Designs

“…Another proposed strategy is to obscure or mask the challenge to the PUF, for example by using a rotating shift register tied to a second, obscured, clock as in [23]. These methods are of particular interest as they use only standard components and thus are implementable on FPGA.…”

“…High uniqueness is also desirable as low uniqueness will make it easier for the mask to be modeled. In order to be preferable to other methods of input masking such as shown by Cao et al [23] the masking PUFs must use a minimum amount of resources and ideally require no post processing.…”

Design of Resistor-Capacitor Physically Unclonable Function for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

“…There are various works related with PUFs, including delay-based PUF [1, [6][7][8][9], and memory-based PUF [10,11] over the past decade. Please refer to [6] for a comprehensive overview on PUFs.…”