Abstract. The generation of unique keys by Integrated Circuits (IC) has important applications in areas such as Intellectual Property (IP) counter-plagiarism and embedded security integration. To this end, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) have been proposed to build tamperresistant hardware by exploiting random process variations. Existing PUFs suffer from increased overhead to the original design due to their specific functions for generating unique keys and/or routing constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel memory-cell based PUF (MECCA PUF), which performs authentication by exploiting the intrinsic process variations in read/write reliability of cells in static memories. The reliability of cells is characterized after manufacturing by inducing temporal failures, such as write and access failures in the cells using a programmable word line duty cycle controller. Since most modern designs already have considerable amount of embedded memory, the proposed approach incurs very little overhead (<1%) compared to existing PUF designs. Simulation results for 1000 chips with 10% inter-die variations show that the PUF provides large choice of challenge-response pairs with high uniqueness (49.9% average inter-die Hamming distance) and excellent reproducibility (0.85% average intra-die Hamming distance).
SRAM cell and memory block based PUF exploiting the intrinsic process variations in read/write reliability of cells in static memories is implemented in REF .
MECCA: a robust low-overhead PUF using embedded memory array
CHES
Computer Science