Total Ionizing Dose Effects on a Delay-Based Physical Unclonable Function Implemented in FPGAs

Abstract

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are hardware security primitives that are increasingly being used for authentication and key generation in ICs and FPGAs. For space systems, they are a promising approach to meet the needs for secure communications at low cost. To this purpose, it is essential to determine if they are reliable in the space radiation environment. In this work we evaluate the Total Ionizing Dose effects on a delay-based PUF implemented in SRAM-FPGA, namely a Ring Oscillator PUF. Several major quality metrics have been used to analyze the evolution of the PUF response with the total ionizing dose. Experimental results demonstrate that total ionizing dose has a perceptible effect on the quality of the PUF response, but it could still be used for space applications by making some appropriate corrections.

Radiation Tolerant Electronics

“…Finally, two articles presented a link between the research fields of cryptography and image processing, respectively. In [14] the authors presented the total ionizing dose effects on a delay-based physical unclonable function implemented in FPGAs for authentication and key generation in space systems. Article [15] discussed a novel method to protect series and parallel line-buffer-based image processing pipelines against configuration memory errors in SRAM-Based FPGAs.…”

Comparison of Various Factors Affected TID Tolerance in FinFET and Nanowire FET

“…Electronic equipment operating in a radiation environment is subject to radiations that lead to defects in transistors. The TID effects, single event effects (SEEs), and displacement damage (DD) can lead to disturbances in the reliable operation of semiconductor devices due to radiation [6][7][8][9][10]. In particular, in the TID effect, the trapped holes in the oxide of transistor in the electron hole pairs (EHP) are caused by radiation and change in the threshold voltage (V T ) [11].…”

Research facilities and highlights at the Centro Nacional de Aceleradores (CNA)

“…The most recent applications of the CNA 60 Co irradiator have been mainly focussed in to analyze dose effects in different electronic systems: unclonable functions implemented in FPGAs [37] and SIMD microprocessors [38,39].…”