A Differential Public PUF Design for Lightweight Authentication

Inhalt:
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have emerged as a promising primitive to provide a hardware keyless security mechanism for integrated circuit applications. Public PUFs (PPUFs) address the crucial PUF vulnerability of requiring databases to store the secrete reference information. This paper investigates one of the PPUF families, differential PPUF (dPPUF), which exploits complexly interacted logic to create time gap between actual execution and simulation, and to prevent simulation attacks. Conventional dPPUFs have high costs. We observe the repressers have large impact on simulation time, but take a great proportion in current dPPUF structure. We thereby present a represser network with specially designed interconnection and shared logic, to maintain a high circuit complexity and to reduce the area cost. We show the proposed dPPUF has similar resilience over simulation attacks as the conventional design. Area cost can be reduced by up to 44%, and thus the proposed design can be used for lightweight authentication.