Reliable Delay Based Algorithm to Boost PUF Security Against Modeling Attacks

Fathi Amsaad,Selcuk Kose,Amer Dawoud,Mohammed Niamat

doi:10.3390/info9090224

Abstract

Silicon Physical Unclonable Functions (sPUFs) are one of the security primitives and state-of-the-art topics in hardware-oriented security and trust research. This paper presents an efficient and dynamic ring oscillator PUFs (d-ROPUFs) technique to improve sPUFs security against modeling attacks. In addition to enhancing the Entropy of weak ROPUF design, experimental results show that the proposed d-ROPUF technique allows the generation of larger and updated challenge-response pairs (CRP space) compared with simple ROPUF. Additionally, an innovative hardware-oriented security algorithm, namely, the Optimal Time Delay Algorithm (OTDA), is proposed. It is demonstrated that the OTDA algorithm significantly improves PUF reliability under varying operating conditions. Further, it is shown that the OTDA further efficiently enhances the d-ROPUF capability to generate a considerably large set of reliable secret keys to protect the PUF structure from new cyber-attacks, including machine learning and modeling attacks.

Highlights

Hardware-based security has recently gained moment as it aims to foster the rapid growth in cybersecurity and cyber-physical research and development
Information 2018, 9, 224 including Arbiter PUFs (APUFs), BPUFs, and SRAM PUFs, ring oscillator PUFs (ROPUFs) have a weaker Entropy in terms of the challenge-response pairs (CRPs) space, and, a limited number of cryptographic keys can be generated by their structures [19]
Suggests that a Slender PUF protocol is used as a resilient technique against all known machine learning attacks, and has a high performance when tested with Machine Learning (ML) algorithms

Summary

Introduction

Hardware-based security has recently gained moment as it aims to foster the rapid growth in cybersecurity and cyber-physical research and development. Information 2018, 9, 224 including APUFs, BPUFs, and SRAM PUFs, ROPUFs have a weaker Entropy in terms of the CRP space (smaller challenge-response pairs), and, a limited number of cryptographic keys can be generated by their structures [19]. A dynamic, multi-stage ROPUF design (d-ROPUF) that increases the CRP space to enhance ROPUF secret key unclonablity and updatability by means of a dynamic PUF structure with multiple CRP behaviors, is introduced [22] This ensures that PUF design is less vulnerable to machine learning and other modeling attacks. Based on process variability of the dynamic RO structures, the proposed technique provides a reliable and large number of challenge response pairs (CRPs) to protect the PUF entity against modeling attacks. The proposed PUF primitive can further generate a larger number of reliable secret keys using a proposed Optimal Time Delay Algorithm (OTDA)

Silicon Physical Unclonable Functions

Cyber Attacks on Silicon PUFs

Proposed Dynamic Ring Oscillator Technique

Reliability and Bit Flips

Conclusions