Register PUF with No Power-Up Restrictions
Sying-Jyan Wang, Chin-Hung Lien, Katherine Shu-Min Li · 2018
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) have been proposed to deal with issues in hardware security. A PUF relies on the intrinsic manufacturing process variations to generate the device-specific responses to challenges. One popular way to implement PUFs is to exploit the unknown power-up values in memory elements as the PUF responses. Since it is difficult to turn on and off memory blocks repeatedly, it may be necessary to store the responses of memory-based PUFs on-chip, which makes the system more vulnerable to malicious attacks. In this paper, we propose a PUF design based on registers. The proposed register PUF can generate responses repeatedly on-line such that there is no need to store the responses. Experimental results show that the proposed design achieves good reliability, randomness, and uniqueness.