An Assessment of the Environmental Noise Effects on the Performance of Configurable based ROPUFs

摘要

Silicon Physical Unclonable Functions (SPUFs) are security primitives that are embodied in a chip and exploit the manufacturing process variations of the Integrated Circuits (ICs) to extract unique secrets for chip authentication and cryptographic key generations. Due to their simple implementation and high performance, Ring Oscillator PUFs (ROPUFs) are one of the most suitable security solutions for silicon technology devices including ASICs and FPGAs. As far as our knowledge goes, there is no comprehensive research that assesses the impact of varying environmental conditions on the performance of controlled-inverter Configurable ROPUFs (c-ROPUF). In this paper, we use our previously proposed c-ROPUF design to analyze RO sample frequencies that are extracted from five Spartan 3E FPGAs (90 nm) at five different temperatures & voltages. The experimental results show that RO frequencies follow a fixed pattern which shows that environmental variation effects are uniformly distributed on the individual ROs throughout the FPGA chips. However, RO frequencies are exposed to high bit flips percentage due to voltage variations compared to temperature variations.