RPPUF: An Ultra-Lightweight Reconfigurable Pico-Physically Unclonable Function for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

Abstract

With the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoTs) technology, security issues have received an increasing amount of attention. Since IoT devices are typically resource-limited, conventional security solutions, such as classical cryptography, are no longer applicable. A physically unclonable function (PUF) is a hardware-based, low-cost alternative solution to provide security for IoT devices. It utilizes the inherent nature of hardware to generate a random and unpredictable fingerprint to uniquely identify an IoT device. However, despite existing PUFs having exhibited a good performance, they are not suitable for effective application on resource-constrained IoT devices due to the limited number of challenge-response pairs (CRPs) generated per unit area and the large hardware resources overhead. To solve these problems, this article presents an ultra-lightweight reconfigurable PUF solution, which is named RPPUF. Our method is built on pico-PUF (PPUF). By incorporating configurable logics, one single RPPUF can be instantiated into multiple samples through configurable information K. We implement and verify our design on the Xilinx Spartan-6 field programmable gate array (FPGA) microboards. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared to previous work, our method increases the uniqueness, reliability and uniformity by up to 4.13%, 16.98% and 10.5%, respectively, while dramatically reducing the hardware resource overhead by 98.16% when a 128-bit PUF response is generated. Moreover, the bit per cost (BPC) metric of our proposed RPPUF increased by up to 28.5 and 53.37 times than that of PPUF and the improved butterfly PUF, respectively. This confirms that the proposed RPPUF is ultra-lightweight with a good performance, making it more appropriate and efficient to apply in FPGA-based IoT devices with constrained resources.