Recursive Challenge Feed Arbiter Physical Unclonable Function (RC-FAPUF) In 180nm Process For Reliable Key Generation In IOT Security

Abstract

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are significant hardware primitives that use physical variations in the manufacturing process to build unclonable keys. They exploit the process variations (PVs) in transistors across the Integrated Circuits (ICs) that generate a unique signature for each chip for identification and authentication. In this article, a novel Recursive Challenge Feed Arbiter Physical Unclonable Function (RC-FAPUF) is proposed to generate unique, unpredictable, and reliable keys which are independent of the challenges that are generally fed by the user. Subsequently, the uncertainty in the prediction of the key increases while performing the security breach on IoT-enabled access systems like smartcards. The proposed design has a significant advantage in the feed-forward arbitration mechanism to generate reliable keys against PVs. Moreover, the robustness of the keys is measured by reliability is achieved as 99.91% when performed over a temperature that ranges from −40°C to +125°C and 99.23% with ±10% variations in supply voltage. The proposed RC-FAPUF is implemented in a 180 nm CMOS process and the responses regarding PVs are validated through a prediction analysis of 48% with Linear Regression (LR) against security attacks. It is confirmed that a significant improvement over previous works is witnessed with our design.