Publication Date

2017

Journal or Book Title

Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications

Abstract

Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) have been touted for their inherent resistance to invasive attacks and low cost in providing a hardware root of trust for various security applications. SRAM PUFs in particular are popular in industry for key/ID generation. Due to intrinsic process variations, SRAM cells, ideally, tend to have the same start-up behavior. SRAM PUFs exploit this start-up behavior. Unfortunately, not all SRAM cells exhibit reliable start-up behavior due to noise susceptibility. Hence, design enhancements are needed for improving reliability. Some of the proposed enhancements in literature include fuzzy extraction, error-correcting codes and voting mechanisms. All enhancements involve a trade-off between area/power/performance overhead and PUF reliability. This paper presents a design enhancement technique for reliability that improves upon previous solutions. We present simulation results to quantify improvement in SRAM PUF reliability and efficiency. The proposed technique is shown to generate a 128-bit key in ≤0.2 μ'>μμ s at an area estimate of 4538 μ'>μμ m 2'>22 with error rate as low as 10−6'>10−610−6 for intrinsic error probability of 15%.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.3390/jlpea7010002

Volume

7

Special Issue

Hardware Security – Threats and Countermeasures at the Circuit and Logic Levels

Issue

1

License

UMass Amherst Open Access Policy

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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