PUF Modeling Attack using Active Learning

Along with the rapid development of hardware security techniques, the revolutionary growth of countermeasures or attacking methods developed by intelligent and adaptive adversaries have significantly complicated the ability to create secure hardware systems. Thus, there is a critical need to (re)evaluate existing or new hardware security techniques against these state-of-the-art attacking methods. With this in mind, this paper presents a novel framework for incorporating active learning techniques into hardware security field. We demonstrate that active learning can significantly improve the learning efficiency of physical unclonable function (PUF) modeling attack, which samples the least confident and the most informative challenge-response pair (CRP) for training in each iteration. For example, our experimental results show that in order to obtain a prediction error below 4%, 2790 CRPs are required in passive learning, while only 811 CRPs are required in active learning. The sampling strategies and detailed applications of PUF modeling attack under various environmental conditions are also discussed. When the environment is very noisy, active learning may sample a large number of mislabeled CRPs and hence result in high prediction error. We present two methods to mitigate the contradiction between informative and noisy CRPs.