Memristive crypto primitive for building highly secure physical unclonable functions

Abstract

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) exploit the intrinsic complexity and irreproducibility of physical systems to generate secret information. The advantage is that PUFs have the potential to provide fundamentally higher security than traditional cryptographic methods by preventing the cloning of devices and the extraction of secret keys. Most PUF designs focus on exploiting process variations in Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology. In recent years, progress in nanoelectronic devices such as memristors has demonstrated the prevalence of process variations in scaling electronics down to the nano region. In this paper, we exploit the extremely large information density available in nanocrossbar architectures and the significant resistance variations of memristors to develop an on-chip memristive device based strong PUF (mrSPUF). Our novel architecture demonstrates desirable characteristics of PUFs, including uniqueness, reliability, and large number of challenge-response pairs (CRPs) and desirable characteristics of strong PUFs. More significantly, in contrast to most existing PUFs, our PUF can act as a reconfigurable PUF (rPUF) without additional hardware and is of benefit to applications needing revocation or update of secure key information.The earliest known lock, resembling the mechanical locks of this century, is estimated to be 4,000 years old-a large wooden lock and key from the palace of Khorasabad in Niveveh. Modern security systems still keep valuables under lock and key in order to ensure the safety and authenticity of goods, information or identities. Locks now, however, can refer to electronic security systems with keys that are coded in, for example, magnetic strips or silicon chips.Since the invention of locks and keys-physical, electronic or combined-the essence of keeping a good security system effective is protecting the key. This is one of the reasons we keep the physical key to our offices on a personal key chain, our electronic access cards on lanyards, and never reveal our computer passwords. Whilst physical locks can be picked, in the digital and electronic worlds hackers have developed both invasive and non-invasive physical tampering methods, such as micro-probing, laser cutting, and power analysis 1 , in order to extract digitised secret information from the integrated circuits (ICs) imprinted on devices such as credit cards. Even tamper proofing techniques used in smartcardssuch as cutting power or tripping tamper-sensitive circuitry that clears out the secret information-to protect secret keys have been shown to be vulnerable to physical attack 1 . Therefore, the problem is storing digital information in a device in such a way that is resistant to physical attacks.Recently, the growing new area of PUFs is receiving increased attention because a PUF offers a solution by extracting secret key information from a complex physical system. Therefore, unlike conventional applications, more randomness is a desirable property for building PUFs. They are favourable because...

Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM): an Overview of Materials, Switching Mechanism, Performance, Multilevel Cell (mlc) Storage, Modeling, and Applications

“…The security aspect has become more prominent with rapid developments in the field of information technology; thus, there is a need for hardware-based securityintegrated circuits. In contrast to security circuits based on CMOS logic which exploits the random nature of the semiconductor manufacturing process, security circuits based on RRAM are more robust to attacks of various types due to its completely random switching mechanisms [170,171]. It must be noted that for security applications, larger variation of RRAM device parameters such as random telegraph noise (RTN), resistance variations and probabilistic switching is desirable, which is quite different from memory applications that require a smaller degree of variation among numerous parameters.…”

Memristors for Hardware Security Applications

“…Each CRP is used only once. [114][115][116] However, many of these proposed works showed at least one weakness: A large number of devices and a strong correlation between the CRPs are required. Traditional CMOS-based strong PUFs are mostly implemented with a time-delay circuit such as an arbiter PUF or a ring oscillator PUF.…”

Random Number Generation from a Secure Photonic Physical Unclonable Hardware Module

“…However, despite the fact that such schemes are resilient to noise, they have been proven vulnerable to a plethora of machine learning and side channel attacks, which has been attributed to their low physical complexity [2]. Furthermore, implementations that are based on the inherent randomness of nanofabrication procedures, like memristors and surface plasmons [3], have shown great promise and potential, but the technology is still immature.…”