IC Piracy Protection by APUF and Logic Obfuscation

Abstract

A strong physically unclonable function (PUF) is a circuit structure that extracts an exponential number of unique chip signatures from a bounded number of circuit components. The strong PUF unique signatures can enable a variety of low overhead security and intellectual property protection protocols applicable to several computing platforms. This paper proposes a novel lightweight (low overhead) strong PUF based on the timings of a classic processor architecture. A small amount of circuitry is added to the processor for on-the-fly extraction of the unique timing signatures. To achieve desirable strong PUF properties, we develop an algorithm which leverages intentional post-silicon aging to tune the inter-chip and intra-chip signature variation. Our evaluation results show that the new PUF meets the desirable inter- and intra-chip strong PUF characteristics, while its overhead is much lower than the existing strong PUFs. For the processors implemented in 45nm technology, the average inter-chip Hamming distance for 32-bit responses is increased by 16.1% after applying our post-silicon tuning method; the aging algorithm also decreases the average intra-chip Hamming distance by 98.1% (for 32-bit responses).

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2014
Accession Number
ADA597856

Entities

People

  • Farinaz Koushanfar
  • Joonho Kong

Organizations

  • Rice University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Cyber
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Algorithms
  • Computers
  • Computing System Architectures
  • Delay Lines
  • Embedded Systems
  • Energy Consumption
  • Intellectual Property
  • Lightweight
  • Logic Gates
  • Operating Systems
  • Power Electronics
  • Reliability
  • Security
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Very Large Scale Integration

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Cybersecurity.
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Integrated Circuit Design and Technology.