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Exploiting Multi-Phase On-Chip Voltage Regulators as Strong PUF Primitives for Securing IoT

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Abstract

The physical randomness of the flying capacitors in the multi-phase on-chip switched-capacitor (SC) voltage converter is exploited as a novel strong physical unclonable function (PUF) primitive for IoT authentication. Moreover, for the strong PUF we devised, an approximated constant input power is achieved against side-channel attacks and a non-linear transformation block is utilized to scramble the high linear relationship between the input challenges and output responses against machine-learning attacks. The results show that the novel strong PUF primitive we designed achieves a nearly 51.3% inter-Hamming distance (HD) and 98.5% reliability while maintaining a high security level against both side-channel and machine-learning attacks.

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Notes

  1. As demonstrated in Fig. 3, the output voltage of an SC converter is a periodical signal. Therefore, the voltage component of \(V_{out,i,j}\) related with the timing t can be unfolded with Fourier series.

  2. w1, \(w_{2}\), ..., \(w_{32}\) control the activation behaviors of the switches \(W_{i,1}\), Wi,2, ... \(W_{i,32}\), respectively. If \(w_{j}= 1\), the switches \(W_{1,j}\) and \(W_{2,j}\) are turned on, and vice versa.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA

    Weize Yu & Yiming Wen

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA

    Selçuk Köse

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

    Jia Chen

Authors
  1. Weize Yu
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  2. Yiming Wen
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  3. Selçuk Köse
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  4. Jia Chen
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Correspondence to Weize Yu.

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Responsible Editor: T. Xia

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Yu, W., Wen, Y., Köse, S. et al. Exploiting Multi-Phase On-Chip Voltage Regulators as Strong PUF Primitives for Securing IoT. J Electron Test 34, 587–598 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-018-5746-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-018-5746-5

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