Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) circuits are promising low-overhead hardware security primitives, but are often gravely susceptible to machine learning–based modeling attacks. Recently, chaotic PUF circuits have been proposed that show greater robustness to modeling attacks. However, they often suffer from unacceptable overhead, and their analog components are susceptible to low reliability. In this article, we propose the concept of a
conditionally chaotic PUF
that enhances the reliability of the analog components of a chaotic PUF circuit to a level at par with their digital counterparts. A conditionally chaotic PUF has two modes of operation:
bistable
and
chaotic
, and switching between these two modes is conveniently achieved by setting a mode-control bit (at a secret position) in an applied input challenge. We exemplify our PUF design framework for two different PUF variants—the CMOS Arbiter PUF and a previously proposed hybrid CMOS-memristor PUF, combined with a hardware realization of the
Lorenz system
as the chaotic component. Through detailed circuit simulation and modeling attack experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed PUF circuits are highly robust to modeling and cryptanalytic attacks, without degrading the reliability of the original PUF that was combined with the chaotic circuit, and incurs acceptable hardware footprint.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.