Quo vadis, PUF?: Trends and challenges of emerging physical-disorder based security

Abstract

The physical unclonable function (PUF) has emerged as a popular and widely studied security primitive based on the randomness of the underlying physical medium. To date, most of the research emphasis has been placed on finding new ways to measure randomness, hardware realization and analysis of a few initially proposed structures, and conventional secretkey based protocols. In this work, we present our subjective analysis of the emerging and future trends in this area that aim to change the scope, widen the application domain, and make a lasting impact. We emphasize on the development of new PUF-based primitives and paradigms, robust protocols, publickey protocols, digital PUFs, new technologies, implementations, metrics and tests for evaluation/validation, as well as relevant attacks and countermeasures.

BIST-PUF: Online, hardware-based evaluation of physically unclonable circuit identifiers

“…Devising attacks and countermeasures for modeling/reverse-engineering of PUFs is an active area of research [6], [16], [9], [15], [10]. One way to attack the PUF is to perform measurements at multiple operational and environmental conditions, e.g., various temperature and supply voltage values [41].…”

“…Since a weak PUF only differs with strong PUF in the number of possible responses, evaluation of weak PUF randomness is simpler since it is confined to the small space of responses. For more information about the PUF, its properties, and recent directions, we refer the interested readers to comprehensive articles on this topic [6], [16].…”

Physical Unclonable Functions and Applications: A Tutorial

“…A full review of each of these paths is outside the scope of this paper, but a few of the popular emerging trends will be covered. For a more comprehensive coverage, we refer interested readers to a recent article on the topic [32].…”

QCAPUF: QCA-based physically unclonable function as a hardware security primitive

“…Various PUF implementations have been presented by taking advantages of random physical characteristics in microelectronic devices such as arbiter PUF [2], ring-oscillator PUF [3][4][5], butterfly PUF [6], clock PUF [7], and memory-based PUF [8,9]. It is expected that the next generation of PUFs will be implemented using emerging nanotechnology-based devices [47].…”