Energy-Efficient and Attacks Resilient PUF Design Exploiting VGSOT-MTJ
Kunal Kranti Das, Aditya Japa, Deepika Gupta, Brajesh Kumar Kaushik · IEEE Open Journal of Nanotechnology · 2025
Spintronic Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) show promise in enhancing electronic system security due to their inherent randomness, low energy consumption, fast response times, and temperature stability. This paper presents a novel PUF based on voltage-gated spin-orbit torque magnetic tunnel junctions (VGSOT-MTJs) that compares the resistance of MTJ cells utilizing intrinsic process variations to get an output response. Compared to arbiter PUFs, the proposed PUF provides a significantly larger effective challenge-response pair (CRP) space by supporting multiple independent configurations and is also reconfigurable. The Proposed VGSOT-MTJ based PUF implemented at 45 nm technology achieves a lower energy consumption of 63.67 fJ/bit and a throughput of 0.27 Gb/s at a supply voltage of 1 V. The proposed PUF achieves near-ideal uniqueness of 50.2% and a high reliability of 97.3%. Moreover, the proposed PUF demonstrates strong resistance to both machine learning (ML) and side-channel attacks. An MLattack using a multilayer perceptron (MLP) yielded a prediction accuracy of under 55.27%, indicating the PUF's resilience. The correlation power analysis (CPA) confirmed the PUF's robustness against side channel attacks. The designed VGSOT-MTJ based PUF shows robust performance with higher energy efficiency and is highly suitable for resource constrained internet of things applications.