PUFs: Myth, Fact or Busted? A Security Evaluation of Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) Cast in Silicon

Abstract

Abstract. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are an emerging technology and have been proposed as central building blocks in a variety of cryptographic protocols and security architectures. However, the security features of PUFs are still under investigation: Evaluation results in the literature are difficult to compare due to varying test conditions, different analysis methods and the fact that representative data sets are publicly unavailable. In this paper, we present the first large-scale security analysis of ASIC implementations of the five most popular intrinsic electronic PUF types, including arbiter, ring oscillator, SRAM, flip-flop and latch PUFs. Our analysis is based on PUF data obtained at different operating conditions from 96 ASICs housing multiple PUF instances, which have been manufactured in TSMC 65 nm CMOS technology. In this context, we present an evaluation methodology and quantify the robustness and unpredictability properties of PUFs. Since all PUFs have been implemented in the same ASIC and analyzed with the same evaluation methodology, our results allow for the first time a fair comparison of their properties.

Information Theoretic Security for Encryption Based on Conditional Rényi Entropies

“…However, the authors missed to include the other different definitions of conditional Rényi entropies provided in [11,12]. Moreover, they did not find the definitions of conditional Rényi entropies corresponding to several conditional min-entropies [13,14] which are useful in cryptographic contexts. Finding reasonable explanation for these min-entropies in terms of conditional Rényi entropies is also an important contribution, since these relations actually bridge interesting information theoretic measures of conditional Rényi entropies and cryptographically important min-entropies.…”

“…We can also find the worst case conditional min-entropy (e.g., in the analysis of physically unclonable functions (PUFs), see [13]). …”

Unconditionally Secure and Universally Composable Commitments from Physical Assumptions

“…Software uncloneability corresponds to the hardness of modeling the function implemented by the PUF and is enforced by unpredictability (given that the challenge/response space of the PUF is adequately large). Determining whether (or to what extent) current PUF candidates actually satisfy the PUF assumption is an active area of research (e.g., [28,5]) but is out of the scope of this work. For a survey on PUF's candidates the reader can refer to [31], while a security analysis of silicon PUFs is provided in [28].…”

Improving Resilience by Deploying Permuted Code onto Physically Unclonable Unique Processors

“…Maes et al [8] and Katzenbeisser et al [9] consider options and bounds for environmental factors in which variation between responses R 1 ← F (C), R 2 ← F (C) of a particular challenge on one single PUF ("intra-distance") are stable, while on the other hand the difference between responses R 1 ← F 1 (C), R 2 ← F 2 (C) to the same challenge on two different PUF instantiations ("inter-distance") becomes distinguishably large. In this context it is of major importance that efficient error correction is accounted for to compensate the intra-distance noise.…”