Novel TCAM-based PUF with improved reliability for hardware-entangled security

Abstract

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are the circuits that extract a number of unique chip signatures determined by random physical variations from fabrication. Since they are able to securely store and generate secret keys, PUFs allow to bootstrap the hardware-based implementation of an information security. This manuscript proposes a novel ternary content addressable memory based PUF (TCAM-PUF) for secure embedded systems. The PUF responses are simulated under various conditions, which are start-up values of TCAM cells. The results show that the proposed TCAM-PUF provides higher reliability and uniqueness than SRAM-PUF, which is one of the widely-used memory cell-based weak PUFs. According to our simulation, our TCAM-PUF provides an inter-chip and intra-chip hamming distance of 49.5% and 3.5% (on average), respectively and uniformity of 49.8% (on average).

A low-overhead RO PUF design for Xilinx FPGAs

“…To illustrate the functionality of the configurable RO, without loss of generality, we set "1100000" corresponding to the values of SEL [1] to SEL [7] as an example to realize two different ROs in a single CLB at the same time. As shown in Fig.…”

“…As shown in Fig. 3, based on the values of SEL [1] to SEL [7], two different ROs, indicated by red and blue routes, are constructed symmetrically.…”

“…[1,2]. A variety of PUF types have already been designed, such as RO PUFs [3,4], arbiter PUFs [5,6], and memory-based PUFs [7,8]. The RO PUF can generate chipunique response by comparing frequency between a pair of ROs designed identically.…”

Power-up control techniques for reliable SRAM PUF

“…For instance, authors in [2] propose a PUF based on the resistance variations in the power grids. At the circuit level, different PUF cell circuit topologies have been proposed, e.g., static random-access memories (SRAMs) [3,4,5], proportional to absolute temperature (PTAT) voltage generators [6], NAND gates [7], current mirrors [8], analog amplifiers [9], ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) [10], sub-threshold current array [11], and leakage-based PUF [12]. In [3], delay variation is used in the clock path to generate PUF outputs, and a post processing circuit is exploited to improve robustness further.…”