STT-DPSA: Digital PUF-Based Secure Authentication Using STT-MRAM for the Internet of Things

Wei-Chen Chien,Sy-Yen Kuo,Ching-Ray Chang,Yao-Tung Tsou,Yu-Chian Chang

doi:10.3390/mi11050502

Abstract

Physical unclonable function (PUF), a hardware-efficient approach, has drawn a lot of attention in the security research community for exploiting the inevitable manufacturing variability of integrated circuits (IC) as the unique fingerprint of each IC. However, analog PUF is not robust and resistant to environmental conditions. In this paper, we propose a digital PUF-based secure authentication model using the emergent spin-transfer torque magnetic random-access memory (STT-MRAM) PUF (called STT-DPSA for short). STT-DPSA is an original secure identity authentication architecture for Internet of Things (IoT) devices to devise a computationally lightweight authentication architecture which is not susceptible to environmental conditions. Considering hardware security level or cell area, we alternatively build matrix multiplication or stochastic logic operation for our authentication model. To prove the feasibility of our model, the reliability of our PUF is validated via the working windows between temperature interval (−35 C, 110 C) and Vdd interval [0.95 V, 1.16 V] and STT-DPSA is implemented with parameters n = 32, i = o = 1024, k = 8, and l = 2 using FPGA design flow. Under this setting of parameters, an attacker needs to take time complexity O() to compromise STT-DPSA. We also evaluate STT-DPSA using Synopsys design compiler with TSMC 0.18 um process.

Highlights

The pervasiveness of smart devices with embedded memories is affecting our daily life
We propose a strong digital Physical Unclonable Function (PUF)-based authentication model through exchanging the challenge-response pairs (CRPs) of matrix A that will be updated in each authentication round using the response of P D between the verifier and client
We demonstrated synthetic results of delay of critical path and cell area with different parameters of STT-DPSA based on ASIC cell-based design flow

Summary

Introduction

The pervasiveness of smart devices with embedded memories is affecting our daily life. It raises great opportunities for large-scale applications such as smart city, home automation, etc. Spin-transfer torque magnetic random-access memory (STT-MRAM), an emergent technical term of embedded memory, is expectantly integrated with the internet of things (IoT). The IoT physically connected to the STT-MRAM is a new trend technology/application and a well intersection for the development of communication and micro-electromechanical techniques. There are several advantages for integrating STT-MRAM with IoT devices, the issue of security such as device identity authentication for this kind of devices is still an open challenge and has drawn much effort for security research communities. An unauthenticated or illegitimate device may share fake information to disturb decisions of Cyber-Physical Systems

Methods

Results

Conclusion