A secure authentication scheme based on differential public PUF
Shengyu Duan, Gaole Sai · 2022
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have emerged as a promising primitive to provide hardware security services like authentication for integrated circuit applications. Public PUFs (PPUFs) address the crucial PUF vulnerability of requiring databases to store the secrete reference information, by using publicly accessible models. PPUFs apply highly complicated structures to cause noticeable time differences between actual execution and simulation, preventing authentication fraud. This paper investigates one of the PPUF families, differential PPUF (dPPUF), and the resistance of dPPUF against prediction attacks. A prediction attack is presented by exploiting the relationship between response, challenge and the initial states of arbiter circuits in dPPUFs. We show the problem is caused by the circuit function of dPPUF, and is independent of the structure of dPPUF. A new authentication scheme is thereby proposed, which challenges a dPPUF subsequently with multiple correlated challenges. We show the above mentioned security flaw is eliminated by our proposed scheme. This scheme further improves uniformity and uniqueness of dPPUFs by 5.81% and 1.78%, respectively, and leads to negligible reductions for CRP space, compared with a conventional authentication process.