A Highly Flexible Ring Oscillator PUF

Abstract

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is one of the most promising hardware features that can be utilized to improve system security. Ring Oscillator (RO) PUF captures the delay difference of a pair or a group of ROs introduced during fabrication process and defines PUF secrecy based on such difference. In this paper, we propose a framework to build RO PUF at inverter level, instead of RO level. This provides us the flexibility in choosing whether an inverter should be included in the RO-PUF and hence improve the security and reliability of RO PUF secrecy and reduce its hardware cost. Experimental results demonstrate that the PUF secrecy generated by our configurable RO PUFs is random (by passing the NIST randomness test) and unique from chip to chip. Our approach is more reliable against voltage and temperature variation than the original RO PUF and is 4X more hardware efficient than the robust 1-out-of-8 RO PUF.