Title
Improving RO-PUF quality on FPGAs by incorporating design-dependent frequency biases
Abstract
Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) based on ring oscillators (ROs) are a popular primitive in hardware security, meant to enable the unambiguous and tamper-proof identification of computer chips. This is achieved by exploiting different signal delays on each chip stemming from uncontrollable variations during the manufacturing process. Thus, the relation between RO frequencies on an individual chip can be used as the chip's unique PUF signature. In this work, we show how ROs implemented on a larger number of Altera Cyclone IV FPGAs are biased towards slower or faster frequencies in non-uniform ways depending on the FPGA's programming with different design; even though the ROs are placed and routed equally. Without considering these biases, inter-device uniqueness of the PUF signatures is degraded. We demonstrate that subtracting the mean frequency of each RO - derived using only a small training set of devices - from the sampled frequencies overcomes this disadvantage; i.e. the uniqueness is increased drastically while maintaining reliability.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/ETS.2015.7138749
2015 20th IEEE European Test Symposium (ETS)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Altera Cyclone IV FPGA,ring oscillators,physically unclonable functions,design-dependent frequency bias,RO-PUF quality
Logic synthesis,Training set,Mean frequency,Uniqueness,Hardware security module,Computer science,Field-programmable gate array,Real-time computing,Chip,Electronic engineering,Manufacturing process,Embedded system
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1530-1877
3
0.40
References 
Authors
9
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Linus Feiten1125.05
Tobias Martin230.40
Matthias Sauer319520.02
Bernd Becker485573.74