Design and Analysis of Stability-Guaranteed PUFs

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information forensics and security Vol. 13; no. 4; pp. 978 - 992
• Main Authors: Wei-Che Wang, Yona, Yair, Diggavi, Suhas N., Gupta, Puneet
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.04.2018
• Subjects: Circuit stability; guesswork theory; Hardware; Hardware security; information theory; Noise measurement; physical unclonable function; security analysis; Side-channel attacks; Silicon; Stability analysis; stable permeant defectivity
• ISSN: 1556-6013; 1556-6021
• DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2017.2774761

The lack of stability is one of the limitations that constrain physical unclonable function (PUF) from being put in widespread practical use. In this paper, we propose a weak PUF and a strong PUF that are both completely stable. These PUFs are called locally enhanced defectivity physical unclonable function (LEDPUF). An LEDPUF is a pure functional PUF that does not require any kinds of correction schemes as conventional parametric PUFs do. The source of randomness of an LEDPUF is extracted from locally enhance defectivity without affecting other parts of the chip. In this paper, we construct a weak LEDPUF by forming arrays of directed self-assembly random connections, and the strong LEDPUF is implemented by using the weak LEDPUF as the key of a keyed-hash message authentication code. Our simulation and statistical results show that the entropy of the weak LEDPUF bits is close to ideal, and the inter-chip Hamming distances of both weak and strong LEDPUFs are about 50%, which means that these LEDPUFs are not only stable but also unique. We develop a new unified framework for evaluating the security of PUFs, based on password security, by using information theoretic tools of guesswork. The guesswork model allows us to quantitatively compare, with a single unified metric, PUFs with varying levels of stability, bias, and available side information. In addition, it generalizes other measures to evaluate the security level, such as min-entropy and mutual information. We evaluate the guesswork-based security of some measured static random access memory and ring oscillator PUFs as an example and compare them with an LEDPUF to show that the stability has a more severe impact on the PUF security than biased responses. Furthermore, we find the guesswork of two new problems: guesswork under the probability of attack failure and the guesswork of strong PUFs that are used for authentication.