An Economic Uniqueness-Improved Reliable Reconfigurable RO PUF for IoT Security

Abstract

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) emerges as a promising solution for Internet of Things (IoT) and hardware security systems. Nevertheless, the advancement in the design of IoT constrained devices is limited due to area overhead and power consumption incurred from applying complex and expensive methods to strengthen hardware security systems in particular the PUF. This paper leverages a reconfigurable PUF design as an efficient solution for hardware security of IoT constrained devices. This work proposes ERRO PUF as a novel economic improved-uniqueness reliable reconfigurable RO PUF for IoT and hardware security. ERRO PUF reduces area overhead and power consumption of the design, improves system design reusability, and reduces hardware resources utilization. It generates more CRPs with considerably less hardware resources, improves hardware efficiency of the PUF design, and achieves better performance with significantly less hardware resources requirement when compared to other conventional ring oscillator (RO), configurable RO (CRO), and reconfigurable RO (RRO) PUF designs. ERRO PUF requires only 6.25% of hardware resources to generate 1-bit PUF response when compared to other state-of-the-art CRO and RRO PUFs. ERRO PUF’s results show that the proposed model is suitable for enhancing a lightweight hardware security system and eliminating the need for trading security with area and power reduction.