Study of different silicon Physical Unclonable Functions

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) provides, efficient and cheap authentication. PUF is a device that harnesses the entropy of a physical system. A PUF will generate a specific bit pattern response for a specific challenge. But different instances of the same PUF circuit will produce different bit patterns. Since the response depends on the inherent properties, the attacker cannot replicate the PUF device even by knowing its design. A detailed survey of different types of Silicon PUF designs has been done and a new delay based Silicon PUF design has been proposed in this paper.

I. Introduction

In today's world, IC security is an important area of concern. We can identify a number of hardware design threats such as •

Counterfeiting - Copying the same IC. It is also known as cloning by which attacker can copy and resell a design.

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Reverse engineering - Extracting IP or sensitive data, such as cryptographic keys, in the on-chip memory. It is a threat to intellectual property and data security.

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Tampering to IC operation or insert malicious functionality, using Trojans or kill switches. Tampering is the attempts of an attacker to gain unauthorized access to an electronic system. It is a threat to integrity and trustworthiness.