Abstract
The generation of unique keys by Integrated Circuits (IC) has important applications in areas such as Intellectual Property (IP) counter-plagiarism and embedded security integration. To this end, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) have been proposed to build tamper-resistant hardware by exploiting random process variations. Existing PUFs suffer from increased overhead to the original design due to their specific functions for generating unique keys and/or routing constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel memory-cell based PUF (MECCA PUF), which performs authentication by exploiting the intrinsic process variations in read/write reliability of cells in static memories. The reliability of cells is characterized after manufacturing by inducing temporal failures, such as write and access failures in the cells using a programmable word line duty cycle controller. Since most modern designs already have considerable amount of embedded memory, the proposed approach incurs very little overhead (<1%) compared to existing PUF designs. Simulation results for 1000 chips with 10% inter-die variations show that the PUF provides large choice of challenge-response pairs with high uniqueness (49.9% average inter-die Hamming distance) and excellent reproducibility (0.85% average intra-die Hamming distance).
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Krishna, A.R., Narasimhan, S., Wang, X., Bhunia, S. (2011). MECCA: A Robust Low-Overhead PUF Using Embedded Memory Array. In: Preneel, B., Takagi, T. (eds) Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems – CHES 2011. CHES 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6917. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23951-9_27
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