Enhanced Reconfigurable Physical Unclonable Function Based on Stochastic Nature of Multilevel Cell RRAM

Abstract

The physical unclonable function (PUF) based on resistive random-access memory (RRAM) possesses a distinctive advantage that can offer higher security and lower cost than the traditional complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor-based cryptographic devices and other conventional PUFs. The intrinsic stochasticity of RRAM devices successfully provides attractive properties to implement PUF. In this paper, we present a novel multistate-based RRAM PUF to realize strong tolerance against attack. By applying multilevel states with bit shuffling to the RRAM PUF, the randomness and uniqueness were enhanced close to ideal values. In addition, the bit error rate was dramatically reduced using the temperature compensation mechanism. Moreover, our new method not only enables the generation of larger challenge–response pairs (CRPs) with less footprint but also can reconfigure CRPs.