Reverse Engineering and Prevention Techniques for Physical Unclonable Functions Using Side Channels
Sheng Wei, James B. Wendt, Ani Nahapetian, Miodrag Potkonjak · 2014
This paper investigates and addresses the vulnerabilities of existing physical unclonable functions (PUFs). We first develop a PUF reverse engineering approach by conducting gate-level characterization (GLC). Based on the gate-level delay properties, we emulate the target PUF by designing a functionally equivalent PUF replication. Furthermore, in order to prevent such an attack, we develop a new sequential PUF architecture that is resilient to side channel-based reverse engineering. We obtain accurate results in emulating the timing behavior of the existing arbiter-based PUFs. Also, the randomness obtained from the sequential PUFs is significantly higher compared to the existing PUFs.