A novel way to authenticate untrusted Integrated Circuits

Counterfeit Integrated Circuits (IC) can be very harmful to the security and reliability of critical applications. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) have been proposed as a mechanism for uniquely identifying ICs and thus reducing the prevalence of counterfeits. However, maintaining large databases of PUF challenge response pairs and dealing with PUF errors makes it difficult to use PUFs reliably. This paper presents an innovative approach to authenticate PUF challenge response pairs on IC chips. The proposed method can tolerate considerable bit errors from responses of PUFs without the use of error correcting codes. It is successful in authenticating 99.96% authorized chips and filtering out 99.92% cloned chips. The overhead is reduced by 65.62% compared to that of other authenticating solutions.

I. Introduction

As the Integrated Circuit industry grows, counterfeiting ICs has also been growing as an illegal means of profit taking. In response to this trend, authenticating untrusted ICs has become a critical and pressing issue. Many methods are already available to identify and authenticate ICs [1]. Among them, solutions based on physical unclonable functions (PUF) show a high level of security due to their unpredictable response [2]. However, the high bit error rate in the response of PUFs requires strong error correcting codes to guarantee a low false negative rate [3]. As a result, it causes a tradeoff between the number of false negatives and the overhead of strong ECC.