Nano-PPUF: A Memristor-Based Security Primitive

Abstract

CMOS devices have been used to build hardware security primitives such as physical unclonable functions. Since MOS devices are relatively easy to model and simulate, CMOS-based security primitives are increasingly prone to modeling attacks. We propose memristor-based Public Physical Unclonable Functions (nano-PPUFs), they have complex models that are difficult to simulate. We leverage sneak path currents, process variations, and computationally intensive SPICE models as features to build the nano-PPUF. With just a few hundreds of memristors, we construct a time-bounded authentication protocol that will take several years for an attacker to compromise.