Testing Techniques for Hardware Security

Abstract

Abstract-System security has emerged as a premier design requirement. While there has been an enormous body of impressive work on testing integrated circuits (ICs) desiderata such as manufacturing correctness, delay, and power, there is no reported effort to systematically test IC security in hardware. Our goal is to provide an impetus for this line of research and development by introducing techniques and methodology for rigorous testing of physically unclonable functions (PUFs). Recently, PUFs received a great deal of attention as security mechanisms due to their flexibility to form numerous security protocols and intrinsic resiliency against physical and side channels attacks.We study three classes of PUFs properties to design pertinent test methods: (i) predictability, (ii) sensitivity to component accuracy, and (iii) susceptibility to reverse engineering.As our case studies, we analyze two popular PUF structures, linear and feed-forward, and show that their security is not adequate from several points of view. The technical highlights of the paper are the first non-destructive technique for PUF reverse engineering and a new PUF structure that is capable of passing our security tests.

A Survey of Hardware Trojan Taxonomy and Detection

“…Majzoobi, Koushanfar, and Potkonjak also introduced a suite of new techniques for testing the security of random IDs, such as true random-number generators (TRNGs), and PUFs. 33 Introducing such techniques is critical for many security applications that use random IDs and PUFs as security primitives or for key generation. The goal is not only to create a methodology for testing the security of random-ID generation and PUFs at the functional and IC levels, but also to define specific techniques and tools that can be extended to other security hardware.…”

Slender PUF Protocol: A Lightweight, Robust, and Secure Authentication by Substring Matching

“…It has been demonstrated in [11] that when the delay parameters δ ∈ Δ come from identical symmetric distributions with zero mean (in particular it is safe to assume that the δ's are i.i.d Gaussian, i.e., δ ∈ N (0, σ)), then the following statistical properties hold for a linear arbiter PUF:…”

“…To improve the statistical properties of a linear PUF, the output of independent PUFs are XOR-mixed together as shown in Fig. 3 [11]. Fig.…”

An Easy-to-Design PUF Based on a Single Oscillator: The Loop PUF

“…Eq. 4 with N = 2 and M = 2 shows that the challenge (0, 1) is equivalent to (2,3). (11,10) The constraint to avoid equivalent challenges can be formalized by this equation:…”