QCAPUF: QCA-based physically unclonable function as a hardware security primitive

Abstract

Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are increasingly used as innovative security primitives to provide the hardware authentication and identification as well as the secret key generation based on unique and random variations in identically fabricated devices. Security and low power have appeared to become two crucial necessities to modern designs. As an emerging nanoelectronic technology, a quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) can achieve ultra-low power consumption as well as an extremely small area for implementing digital designs. However, there are various classes of permanent defects that can happen during the manufacture of QCA devices. The recent extensive research has been focused on how to eliminate errors in QCA structures resulting from fabrication variances. By a completely different vision, to turn this disadvantage into an advantage, this paper presents a novel QCA-based PUF (QCAPUF) architecture to exploit the unique physical characteristics of fabricated QCA cells in order to produce different hardware fingerprint instances. This architecture is composed of proposed logic and interconnect blocks that have critical vulnerabilities and perform unexpected logical operations. The behaviour of QCAPUF is thoroughly analysed through physical relations and simulations. Results confirm that the proposed QCAPUF has state of the art PUF characteristics in the QCA technology. This paper will serve as a basis for further research into QCA-based hardware security primitives and applications.

Implementation of the new SCV method in quantum‐dot cellular automata

“…The cross structure can ensure the normal transmission of two routes of information. The most commonly used gates in QCA are majority gates and inverters [5][6][7]. The expression for the three-input majority gate is…”

“…9 shows its structural divisions. From this figure, we can get their PTM expressions as T C = (T wire ⊗ T fan ⊗ T wire )(T wire ⊗ T not ⊗ T wire ⊗ T wire ) (T and ⊗ T and )T or (7) where ⊗ denotes the tensor product, each term in the formula corresponds to a gate's PTM. T C is our proposed QCA-based circuit's PTM, T wire is a wire's PTM, T fan is a fan-out's PTM, T not is an Inverter's PTM, T and is a AND gate's PTM and T or is an OR gate's PTM.…”

“…The most commonly used gates in QCA are majority gates and inverters [5–7]. The expression for the three‐input majority gate is Its structure is illustrated in Fig.…”

“…QCA was first proposed by Lent et al in 1993 [3] and is a nanodevice based on quantum cells [4]. Due to extremely low power consumption [5] and dissipation, high device packing density, high operating speed (THz), and inherent pipeline characteristics have caused it to attract widespread attention in recent years [6][7][8][9]. The position of the quantum dot is occupied by electrons and binary information is encoded without any current flowing between the cells.…”

In memory computation using quantum‐dot cellular automata

“…Quantum‐dot cellular automata (QCA) is evolving as a prominent nano‐electronic technology to fulfil the demand for low power high‐speed compact devices [10–14]. Recently, Abutaleb et al show how QCA inherent property can be used to design physically unclonable functions to enhance nano communication security [15]. Lu et al show how systolic array can be used to realise matrix multiplier with great parallelism [16].…”