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Reliable low-overhead arbiter-based physical unclonable functions for resource-constrained IoT devices

Published: 24 January 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are promising hardware security primitives suitable for resource-constrained devices requiring lightweight cryptographic methods. However, PUF responses frequently suffer from instability due to varying environmental conditions such as voltage and temperature. In this paper, we introduce circuit-level techniques to enhance the reliability of delay-based PUFs against temperature variation. We propose a voltage controlled current starved (VCCS) delay element that can effectively reduce temperature sensitivity and thus improve the reliability of PUF responses. Built on the VCCS delay element, two test-case arbiter-based PUF architectures are implemented in a standard 65nm CMOS technology and validated through post-layout Monte-Carlo simulation. Evaluation results show that two proposed PUF designs satisfy requirements on randomness, uniqueness, and reliability over a wide temperature range. Moreover, the proposed approach imposes only a marginal overhead leading to one of the most energy-efficient PUFs in the state-of-the-art.

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  • (2020)Physical unclonable function: architectures, applications and challenges for dependable securityIET Circuits, Devices & Systems10.1049/iet-cds.2019.0175Online publication date: 7-Feb-2020
  • (2019)Physical Unclonable Functions in the Internet of Things: State of the Art and Open ChallengesSensors10.3390/s1914320819:14(3208)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2019
  1. Reliable low-overhead arbiter-based physical unclonable functions for resource-constrained IoT devices

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    CS2 '17: Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Cryptography and Security in Computing Systems
    January 2017
    39 pages
    ISBN:9781450348690
    DOI:10.1145/3031836
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 24 January 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. IoT security
    2. delay-based PUF
    3. hardware security
    4. physical unclonable function (PUF)
    5. temperature variation

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    CS2 '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 4 of 11 submissions, 36%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 27 of 91 submissions, 30%

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    View all
    • (2020)Physical unclonable function: architectures, applications and challenges for dependable securityIET Circuits, Devices & Systems10.1049/iet-cds.2019.0175Online publication date: 7-Feb-2020
    • (2019)Physical Unclonable Functions in the Internet of Things: State of the Art and Open ChallengesSensors10.3390/s1914320819:14(3208)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2019

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