Memory-based Arbiter PUF: A Novel Highly Reliable and Scalable Strong PUF Design

Abstract

While Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are finding a foothold in many commercial hardware platforms as an alternative secure key storage primitive. PUFs are yet to be employed as primitives that can offer secure authentication. Strong PUFs, which are required for authentication protocols due to their large challenge-response space, suffer from reduced output reliability. In this work, we present a novel Memory-based Arbiter PUF design where we combine the benefits of Weak PUFs’ high reliability with the exponential challenge-response space of the Strong Arbiter PUFs. The introduced design is a unique and novel approach where the Arbiter PUF is implemented as an arithmetic module while its entropy is stored as a memory in a reliable Weak PUF circuit. The introduced design offers the high reliability of Weak PUFs and the security and exponential challenge space of Strong PUF circuits as implementation and testing results show.