Halide perovskite memristors as flexible and reconfigurable physical unclonable functions

Rohit Abraham John,Metikoti Jagadeeswararao,Sujaya Kumar Vishwanath,Chip-Hong Chang,Nripan Mathews,Si En Ng,Nimesh Shah,Arindam Basu,Benny Febriansyah

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-24057-0

Rohit Abraham John, Metikoti Jagadeeswararao + Show 7 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24057-0

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Journal: Nature Communications	Publication Date: Jun 17, 2021
Citations: 117	License type: open-access

Affiliation: Nanyang Technological University

Abstract

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) address the inherent limitations of conventional hardware security solutions in edge-computing devices. Despite impressive demonstrations with silicon circuits and crossbars of oxide memristors, realizing efficient roots of trust for resource-constrained hardware remains a significant challenge. Hybrid organic electronic materials with a rich reservoir of exotic switching physics offer an attractive, inexpensive alternative to design efficient cryptographic hardware, but have not been investigated till date. Here, we report a breakthrough security primitive exploiting the switching physics of one dimensional halide perovskite memristors as excellent sources of entropy for secure key generation and device authentication. Measurements of a prototypical 1 kb propyl pyridinium lead iodide (PrPyr[PbI3]) weak memristor PUF with a differential write-back strategy reveals near ideal uniformity, uniqueness and reliability without additional area and power overheads. Cycle-to-cycle write variability enables reconfigurability, while in-memory computing empowers a strong recurrent PUF construction to thwart machine learning attacks.

Highlights

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) address the inherent limitations of conventional hardware security solutions in edge-computing devices
Unlike traditional non-volatile memory (NVM)-based secret key storage, here the digital bits of the key could be extracted on the fly by utilizing the entropy existent within the variations in the high or low resistance states—this makes it extremely difficult to read out the key directly as is the case with the traditional method of the digital key stored in an NVM
We present stochasticity in the switching physics of onedimensional halide perovskite (1-D halide perovskites (HPs)) memristors as excellent sources of entropy to design physical-disorder-based security primitives for key generation and device authentication

Summary

Introduction

We hypothesize that embracing these intrinsically coupled sources of entropy in halide perovskite memristor PUFs (HP memPUFs) in combination with advanced bit-stabilization techniques will be advantageous to create robust hardware security primitives for secure key generation and device authentication (Fig. 1). We demonstrate (i) both weak and strong PUF modes; (ii) writeback assisted near-perfect uniqueness, reliability, and randomness; (iii) reconfigurability to refresh keys when necessary; (iv) as well as a recurrent scheme of response generation that enhances the security of small crossbar arrays against machine learning attacks.

Results

Conclusion