A novel PUF based on cell error rate distribution of STT-RAM

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have been widely proposed as security primitives to provide device identi­ fication and authentication. Recently, PUFs based on Non -volatile Memory (NVM) are widely proposed since the promise of NVMs' wide application. In addition, NVM-based PUFs are considered to be more immune to invasive attack and simulation attack than CMOS-based PUFs. However, the existing NVM-based PUF ei­ ther shows the unreliability under environmental variations or need extra modifications to the IC manufacturing process. In this work, we propose err-PUF, a novel PUF design based on the cell error rate distribution of STT-RAM. Instead of using the distri­ bution directly, we generate a stable fingerprint based on a novel concept called Error-rate Differential Pair (EDP) without modifi­ cations to the read/write circuits. Comprehensive results demon­ strate that err-PUF can achieve sufficient reliability under envi­ ronmental variations, which can significantly ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: ASPDAC
• Authors: Xian Zhang, Guangyu Sun, Yaojun Zhang, Yiran Chen, Hai Li, Wujie Wen, Jia Di
• Keywords: ASPDAC 2016, Hardware