A memristor fingerprinting and characterisation methodology for hardware security

Abstract

The modern IC supply chain encompasses a large number of steps and manufacturers. In many applications it is critically important that chips are of the right quality and are assured to have been obtained from the legitimate supply chain. To this end, it is necessary to be able to uniquely identify systems to aid in supply chain tracking and quality assurance. Many identifiers, however, can be cloned onto counterfeit devices and are therefore untrustworthy. This paper proposes a methodology for using post-CMOS memristor devices as a fingerprint to uniquely identify ICs. To achieve this, memristors’ unique and variable I–V characteristics are exploited to produce a fingerprint that can be generally applicable to a wide variety of different memristor technologies and identifiable over time, even where cell retention is non-ideal. In doing so it aims to minimise the hardware required on-chip both to minimise cost and maximise the auditability of the system. The methodology is applied to a text {TiO}_x memristor technology, and shown to be able to identify cells in a set.