Enhancing the Performance of Lightweight Configurable PUF for Robust IoT Hardware-Assisted Security

Abstract

Lightweight physical unclonable functions (LPUFs) exploit manufacturing process variations of semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) to protect IoT-based electronic and smart devices from new cyberattacks. This paper proposes two novel security techniques to enhance the robustness of LPUFs using configurable-based ring oscillator PUFs (CF-ROPUFs). These techniques are the intar-die frequency aware (IFA) approach to improve PUF reliability and the logarithmic gamma function (Ln) technique to enhance PUF randomness. The lightweight CF-ROPUF design is realized on hardware, and data samples are collected under varying temperatures and supply voltages over a population of 30 Spartan-3E FP-GAs.Experimental results of the IFA technique in terms of average Hamming Weight (HM) demonstrate that the percentage of the reliable RO sample frequencies PUF output is 98.5%. For the analysis, PUF reliability is evaluated in terms of accuracy, repeatability, and reproducibility, which are the international organization for Standardization (ISO) standards. The results indicate that the RO samples are accurately measured from the CF-ROPUFs mapped in all the chips. After using the proposed 1-out-of-r coding algorithm, the results demonstrate high average repeatability of 98.2% and a magnified average reproducibility of 99.63%. It is also shown that our CF-ROPUF design is immune from accelerated aging impacts reliability issues. Statistical results show thatLnenhances the normality and mitigates the negative impacts of the systematic process variations on RO sample frequencies. Randomness results show that CF-ROPUF binary response bits can successfully pass the 15 NIST test suites for true randomness with an enhanced percentage, 93.3%, with the application of the 1-out-of-r coding INDEX TERMS Lightweight hardware security, configurable ROPUF, PUF reliability, PUF aging, ISO standards.

A highly stable XOR APUF based on deviation signal screening mechanism

“…where, K represents the number of PUFs set, Ri and Rj represent the n-bit response obtained after applying the same excitation to the i-th and j-th PUFs respectively, and N represents the number of response bits. The ideal value of uniqueness is 50%, which means that there is no correlation between the responses generated by two PUFs [30]. The uniqueness and average value of the HS-XOR APUF are calculated by the experiment.…”

Microcontroller-Based PUF for Identity Authentication and Tamper Resistance of Blockchain-Compliant IoT Devices

“…These physical values vary from device to device due to manufacturing variability and are used to derive a unique identifying key for each IoT device. More complex PUF examples include ring oscillators [ 59 ], XOR logic gate meshes [ 60 ], and flip-flop logic circuits [ 61 ].…”