Adiabatic/MTJ-Based Physically Unclonable Function for Consumer Electronics Security

Abstract

Consumer electronics require secure operation in the face of the many emerging threat vectors. One hardware security primitive is the Physically Unclonable Function (PUF). PUFs utilize process variations to give a device a digital fingerprint and are an important resource in secure hardware. One drawback of the addition of secure hardware is the increased energy consumption. In this paper, we look to design a secure, low-energy PUF using both adiabatic logic and Magnetic Tunnel Junctions (MTJ). Adiabatic logic reduces the dynamic energy consumption of the PUF while the MTJs offer a near zero-leakage power, non-volatile memory option. MTJs have two stable states depending on the magnetization direction of the free layer with respect to that of the fixed layer. Hence, the proposed adiabatic/MTJ PUF offers two modes of operation depending on the orientation of the MTJ. Our proposed adiabatic/MTJ PUF has average reliability of 97.07% and 96.97% between the two modes of operation while taking into account temperature, supply voltage, and TMR variations. The two modes of our proposed PUF consume 5.2 fJ and 5.1 fJ per bit.