Improving the quality of a Physical Unclonable Function using configurable Ring Oscillators

Abstract

A silicon physical unclonable function (PUF), which is a die-unique challenge-response function, is an emerging hardware primitive for secure applications. It exploits manufacturing process variations in a die to generate unique signatures out of a chip. This enables chip authentication and cryptographic key generation. A ring oscillator (RO) based PUF is a promising solution for FPGA platforms. However, the quality factors of this PUF, which include uniqueness, reliability and attack resiliency, are negatively affected by environmental noise and systematic variations in the die. This paper proposes two methods to address these negative effects, and to achieve a higher reliability in an RO-based PUF. Both methods are empirically verified on a population of five FPGAs over varying environmental conditions, and demonstrate how practically useful RO-based PUF can be achieved.