Random stream cipher as a PUF-like identity in FPGA environment
Ayoub Mars, Wael Adi, Saleh Mulhem, Emad Hamadaqa · 2017
Digital Secret Unknown Cipher (SUC) has been proposed in the last decade targeting to counteract the drawbacks of the traditional analog Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF). The SUCs, as pure-digital units, exhibit consistent operation during the whole digital unit's lifetime. This makes SUCs as PUF alternatives attractive for practical creation of clone-resistant units for a broad spectrum of applications especially in automotive and other mass-product cases. In this paper, we propose a novel SUC creation scenario as a random stream cipher to be embedded in Microsemi SmartFusion®2 System on Chip (SoC) FPGAs. The resulting cipher as a Key Stream Generators (KSG) is T-functions-based creating individual and randomized secret-key-streams which are individual for each unit. The proposed SUC-based Random Stream Cipher (RSC-SUC) is a lightweight SUC realization optimized for the SmartFusion®2 SoC FPGA technology. The security analysis and hardware complexity issues of the resulting RSC-SUC structures are also discussed and evaluated.