Abstract
Process variations in the manufacturing of digital circuits can be leveraged to design Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) that are extensively employed in hardware-based security. Different PUFs based on Magnetic Random-Access-Memory (MRAM) devices have been studied and proposed in the literature. However, most of these studies have been simulation-based, which do not fully capture the physical reality. We present experimental results on a PUF implemented on dies fabricated with a type of the MRAM technology namely Thermally-Assisted-Switching MRAM (TAS-MRAM). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental validation of a TAS-MRAM-based PUF. We demonstrate how voltage values used for writing in the TAS-MRAM cells can make stochastic behaviors required for PUF design. The analysis of the obtained results provides some preliminary findings on the practical application of TAS-MRAM-based PUFs in authentication protocols. Besides, the results show that for key-generation protocols, one of the standard error correction methods should be employed if the proposed PUF is used.
Highlights
Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are primitive and essential circuitry components for hardware-based security
The measured quality metrics and analysis results in this study provide some preliminary findings showing that TAS-Magnetic Random-Access-Memory (MRAM) can be used in authentication or key-generation protocols instead of Static RAM (SRAM) PUFs
In this work, practical experiments are performed on fabricated TAS-MRAM dies
Summary
Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are primitive and essential circuitry components for hardware-based security. The word unclonable in the term PUF refers to the most important property of such circuits It suggests the difficulty of fabricating a circuit or developing an algorithm able to generate the same inputs/outputs of PUF. Weak PUFs employed within IoT devices have at least one unclonable output, the so-called response, which is unique per each fabricated device (PUF instance) while applying an identical challenge [2], [3]. They can be utilized as the device ID, secret authentication signature, or secret cryptographic key [13]. A large number of challenge-response pairs (CRPs) in strong PUFs have enough entropy to be able to replace Hardware Security Modules in Public Key Infrastructure [8], [14]
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