NAND Flash-Based Digital Fingerprinting for Robust and Secure Hardware Authentication

In today’s world, embedded systems and microcontroller-based modules have become increasingly integrated into our daily lives. However, the security of these embedded devices and the assurance of hardware authenticity have raised concerns within the expanding realm of the Internet of Things (IoT). In this study, we established an experimental environment to observe the disturbance of SLC flash memory programming for the purpose of designing a physical unclonable function (PUF). Our findings revealed that intra-page disturbance is more easily generated compared to inter-page disturbance. Additionally, we observed a pairing pattern where adjacent pages are paired in a (2n, 2n+1) manner, and disturbances only occur within a pair: Finally, we discovered that as the page number increases from 0 to 63, it becomes progressively more challenging to detect the initial bit flip within a page, thereby making it more difficult to achieve a stable disturbance state.