Design of a Reliable Current Starved Inverter Based Arbiter Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) for Hardware Cryptography

Abstract

For most cryptographic algorithms, the secret keys must be permanently stored in nonvolatile memories (NVNs) and used for distinct security operations. This gives rise to power constraints, location limits and security threats to hardware facilities. To solve the problems, this paper proposes a novel and reliable current starved inverter (CSI) based on a physical unclonable function (PUF) architecture (8, 16 and 32 stages), using 45nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. The proposed CSI was simulated on Spectre Simulation Platform. The results show that its uniqueness, reliability and randomness were 49.26 %, 98.86 % and 86.12 %, respectively, in the temperature range of-20~80 ℃. In addition, the performance of the proposed CSI was proved to outshine that of existing PUF architectures in stability and reliability. The research results are significant for the development of critical security applications.