An Anti-Electromagnetic Attack PUF Based on a Configurable Ring Oscillator for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an emerging technology employed in some crucial applications. However, limited resources and physical exposure to attackers make security a challenging issue for a WSN. Ring oscillator-based physical unclonable function (RO PUF) is a potential option to protect the security of sensor nodes because it is able to generate random responses efficiently for a key extraction mechanism, which prevents the non-volatile memory from storing secret keys. In order to deploy RO PUF in a WSN, hardware efficiency, randomness, uniqueness, and reliability should be taken into account. Besides, the resistance to electromagnetic (EM) analysis attack is important to guarantee the security of RO PUF itself. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture of configurable RO PUF based on exclusive-or (XOR) gates. First, it dramatically increases the hardware efficiency compared with other types of RO PUFs. Second, it mitigates the vulnerability to EM analysis attack by placing the adjacent RO arrays in accordance with the cosine wave and sine wave so that the frequency of each RO cannot be detected. We implement our proposal in XINLINX A-7 field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and conduct a set of experiments to evaluate the quality of the responses. The results show that responses pass the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) statistical test and have good uniqueness and reliability under different environments. Therefore, the proposed configurable RO PUF is suitable to establish a key extraction mechanism in a WSN.

Generating randomness: making the most out of disordering a false order into a real one

“…The hardware efficiency, randomness, uniqueness, and reliability of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are also of relevance. A configurable device based on exclusive-or gates was used to increase hardware efficiency and mitigate vulnerability to EM analysis attacks, passing NIST’s statistical test [12].…”

Theoretical Analysis of Configurable RO PUFs and Strategies to Enhance Security

“…Although the number of CRPs increases and hardware consumption decreases, the correlation between them also increases significantly, which make them vulnerable of to potential attacks. When obtaining sufficient CRPs, machine modeling attacks can predict all CRPs and make the structure clonable [6] [7].…”

Pitfall of the Strongest Cells in Static Random Access Memory Physical Unclonable Functions

“…Pappu [ 5 ] proposed the concept of PUFs and presented the first method for PUF hardware design. Since then, many different types of PUFs have been proposed such as arbiter PUF [ 6 ], Ring Oscillator RO) PUF [ 7 ], Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) PUF [ 8 ], butterfly PUF [ 9 ], and double-data-rate SDRAM Type 3 (DDR3) PUF [ 10 ]. Among these PUFs, SRAM PUF is widely used because of the following advantages [ 11 , 12 ]: (1) SRAM is a standard component existing on different process nodes, and (2) many chips have built-in SRAM arrays as caches and temporary data storage units that can be used as PUFs to generate Challenge-Response pairs (CRPs) without requiring additional design and area overhead compared to other types of PUFs.…”