A novel current controlled configurable RO PUF with improved security metrics

Abstract

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are promising hardware security primitives which produce unique signatures. Out of several delay based PUF circuits, Configurable Ring Oscillator (CRO) PUF has got higher uniqueness and it is resilient against modelling attacks. In this paper, we present a novel Current controlled CRO (C-CRO) PUF in which inverters of RO uses different logic styles: static CMOS and Feedthrough logic (FTL). Use of different logic styles facilitates improvement of security metrics of PUF. The analysis of security metrics of the proposed architecture is carried out in 90nm CMOS technology shows, using FTL logic leads to better security metrics. Proposed C-CRO PUF is also both power and area efficient. Further, in order to measure the vulnerability of proposed PUF, machine learning attack is carried out and the result shows FTL RO based C-CRO PUF is highly resilient to machine learning attack because of its non-linearity property.