A Quantitative Security Ranking Method of PUF Based on the Rademacher Complexity of PUFs
Xuexiang Deng, Xiaole Cui, Xing Zhang · IEEE Embedded Systems Letters · 2025
Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is regarded as one of the promising hardware security primitives. However, the modeling attack poses a real threat to the security of PUFs in recent years. So the security becomes an important characteristic of PUF, in addition to the randomness, uniqueness and reliability. Researchers have proposed some methods to evaluate the security of PUFs. However, the quantitative security ranking method of different PUFs is still an open issue. This work introduces the Rademacher complexity of PUF, abbreviated as the R complexity, to evaluate the security of PUFs. A ranking method of PUF security is proposed based on the R complexity. The proposed method is able to against the noise effect of challenge-response pairs (CRPs). The securities of twelve different types of PUFs with different sizes are ranked by the proposed method. The ranking results are in line with the results from the security improvement practices of these PUFs, which verify the effectiveness of the proposed ranking method.