Implementation and Characterization of a Physical Unclonable Function for IoT: A Case Study With the TERO-PUF

Abstract

Today, life is becoming increasingly connected. From TVs to smartphones, including vehicles, buildings, and household appliances, everything is interconnected in what we call the "Internet of Things" (IoT). IoT is now part of our life and we have to deal with it. More than 10 billion devices are already connected and five times more are expected to be deployed in the next five years. While deployment and integration of IoT is expanding, one of the main challenge is to provide practical solutions to security, privacy and trust issues in IoT. Protection and security mechanisms need to include features such as interoperability and scalability but also traceability, authentication and access control while remaining lightweight. Among the most promising approaches to such security mechanisms, physical unclonable functions (PUF) provide a unique identifier for similar but different integrated circuits using some of their physical characteristics. These types of functions can thus be used to authenticate integrated circuits, provide traceability and access control. This paper presents a comprehensive case study of the transient effect ring oscillator (TERO) PUF from its implementation on FPGAs to its complete characterization. The implementation of the PUF is detailed for two different families of FPGAs: Xilinx Spartan 6 and Altera Cyclone V. All the metrics used for the characterization are explained in detail and the results of the characterization include robustness to environmental parameters including variations in temperature and voltage. Finally, we compare our results with those obtained for another PUF: the ring oscillator (RO) PUF. All the design files are available online to ensure repeatability and enable comparison of our contribution with other studies.

Physical Security of Ring-based PUF

“…Such active physical attack can cause denial-ofservice but using laser is expensive and cheaper equipment can be use efficiently. Indeed, as proven in [3] by Marchand et al and in [5] by Cao et al, simple power or temperature (cooling, heating) variations can cause dramatic response variation on ring-based PUF especially when the variations go beyond the device specifications for RO-PUF and TERO-PUF both.…”

“…Digital oscillating cells, RO and TERO, are known to be very sensitive on voltage and temperature variations. This sensitivity is an usual issue for the PUF designer [3] and an advantage to design digital voltage or temperature sensor. This sensitivity can be use by an attacker to cause denial-of-service of ring-based PUF.…”

Low-Complexity Nonlinear Self-Inverse Permutation for Creating Physically Clone-Resistant Identities

“…Later, the PUF was defined as an unknown function [11]. Several electronic PUFs were presented such as ring oscillator PUFs [10,12], TERO-PUF [13], arbiter PUFs [14], Chaos-based PUFs [15], etc. Furthermore, PUFs were classified into two categories: If a PUF can produce an enormous number of input-output pairs (challenge-response pairs (CR-pairs)), then it is assigned as a Strong PUF.…”

Exploration of Solar Cell Materials for Developing Novel PUFs in Cyber-Physical Systems

“…IoT devices also face major challenges in the form of security. Two major areas of concern are authentication and access control [13,21]. The non-volatile memories used to store secret keys have been shown to be vulnerable to active attacks [3,16].…”