PUF Based Authentication System for IoT Nodes: A Comparative Study

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is an established hardware security primitive which is useful in mitigating chip counterfeiting, IP protection and cryptographic key generation. In this paper, we propose a XOR based Arbiter PUF which is an improvement to conventional arbiter PUF. A network of XOR gates is placed between the arbiter stages in conventional arbiter PUF to construct the proposed PUF. The PUF can be configured for different size of challenge response pairs (CRPs) due to its modular design. It is scalable in terms of the stages of arbitration required as well as the width of the challenge bits given as input The designed PUF is implemented on Xilinx Artix-7 and Spartan-6 FPGAs and the standard PUF design metrices like uniqueness, reliability and uniformity are measured and comparative analysis is presented. The proposed PUF exhibits the better PUF metrics in comparison with conventional Arbiter PUF and other recently presented PUF topologies in the literature. Near field communication (NFC) based applications needs the sound authentication systems and PUF circuits are suitable for the purpose. The proof-of-concept prototype is developed for authentication in NFC systems using proposed XOR based PUF and effectiveness of proposed PUF is validated.