skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: CycPUF: Cyclic Physical Unclonable Function
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) leverage manufacturing process imperfections that cause propagation delay discrepancies for the signals traveling along these paths. While PUFs can be used for device authentication and chip-specific key generation, strong PUFs have been shown to be vulnerable to machine learning modeling attacks. Although there is an impression that combinational circuits must be designed without any loops, cyclic combinational circuits have been shown to increase design security against hardware intellectual property theft. In this paper, we introduce feedback signals into traditional delay-based PUF designs such as arbiter PUF, ring oscillator PUF, and butterfly PUF to give them a wider range of possible output behaviors and thus an edge against modeling attacks. Based on our analysis, cyclic PUFs produce responses that can be binary, steady-state, oscillating, or pseudo-random under fixed challenges. The proposed cyclic PUFs are implemented in field programmable gate arrays, and their power and area overhead, in addition to functional metrics, are reported compared with their traditional counterparts. The security gain of the proposed cyclic PUFs is also shown against state-of-the-art attacks.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2245247
PAR ID:
10569953
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
IEEE
Date Published:
ISBN:
978-3-9819263-8-5
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1-6
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Valencia, Spain
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; (, 2021 IEEE International Conference on Networking, Architecture and Storage (NAS))
    Security is of importance for communication networks, and many network nodes, like sensors and IoT devices, are resource-constrained. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) leverage physical variations of the integrated circuits to produce responses unique to individual circuits and have the potential for delivering security for low-cost networks. But before a PUF can be adopted for security applications, all security vulnerabilities must be discovered. Recently, a new PUF known as Interpose PUF (IPUF) was proposed, which was tested to be secure against reliability-based modeling attacks and machine learning attacks when the attacked IPUF is of small size. A recent study showed IPUFs succumbed to a divide-and-conquer attack, and the attack method requires the position of the interpose bit known to the attacker, a condition that can be easily obfuscated by using a random interpose position. Thus, large IPUFs may still remain secure against all known modeling attacks if the interpose position is unknown to attackers. In this paper, we present a new modeling attack method of IPUFs using multilayer neural networks, and the attack method requires no knowledge of the interpose position. Our attack was tested on simulated IPUFs and silicon IPUFs implemented on FPGAs, and the results showed that many IPUFs which were resilient against existing attacks cannot withstand our new attack method, revealing a new vulnerability of IPUFs by re-defining the boundary between secure and insecure regions in the IPUF parameter space. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; (, 2022 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI))
    Internet of Things (IoT) have broad and deep penetration into our society, and many of them are resource-constrained, calling for lightweight security protocols. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) leverage physical variations of circuits to produce responses unique for individual devices, and hence are not reproducible even by their manufacturers. Implementable with simplistic circuits and operable with low energy, PUFs are promising candidates as security primitives for resource-constrained IoT devices. Arbiter PUF (APUF) and its variants are lightweight in resource requirements but suffer from vulnerability to machine learning attacks. To defend APUF variants against machine learning attacks, in this paper we investigate a challenge input interface, which incurs low overhead. Analytical and experimental studies were carried out, showing substantial improvement of resistance against machine learning attacks when a PUF is equipped with the interface, rendering interfaced APUF variants promising candidates for security critical applications. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; (, Science Advances)
    Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are a class of hardware-specific security primitives based on secret keys extracted from integrated circuits, which can protect important information against cyberattacks and reverse engineering. Here, we put forward an emerging type of PUF in the electromagnetic domain by virtue of the self-dual absorber-emitter singularity that uniquely exists in the non-Hermitian parity-time (PT)–symmetric structures. At this self-dual singular point, the reconfigurable emissive and absorptive properties with order-of-magnitude differences in scattered power can respond sensitively to admittance or phase perturbations caused by, for example, manufacturing imperfectness. Consequently, the entropy sourced from inevitable manufacturing variations can be amplified, yielding excellent PUF security metrics in terms of randomness and uniqueness. We show that this electromagnetic PUF can be robust against machine learning–assisted attacks based on the Fourier regression and generative adversarial network. Moreover, the proposed PUF concept is wavelength-scalable in radio frequency, terahertz, infrared, and optical systems, paving a promising avenue toward applications of cryptography and encryption. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; (, IEEE)
    Amsaad, F; Abdelgawad, A; Jamil, A (Ed.)
    Fault Injection attack is a type of side-channel attack on the Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) module that can induce faults in the PUF response by manipulating the PUF circuit behavior through voltage glitches, laser attacks, temperature manipulations, or any other attacks potentially leading to information loss or security system failure. This type of attack exposes the physical characteristics of PUFs that can be analyzed to predict or compromise the unique challenge response pairs (CRPs) reducing the security and reliability of the PUF. Mitigation strategies against such attacks typically include adding noise to the PUF output, using error-correcting codes, or enhanced cryptographic protocols that obscure physical side-channel attacks. In this research, we propose a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based security model, that monitors the PUF behavior and detects the variations in PUF response. The model can detect glitches in the PUF response and generate alerts to take mitigation measures. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Hardware Oriented Security and Trust)
    Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have become an important and promising hardware primitive for device fingerprinting, device identification, or key storage. Intrinsic PUFs leverage components already found in existing devices, unlike extrinsic silicon PUFs, which are based on customized circuits that involve modification of hardware. In this work, we present a new type of a memory-based intrinsic PUF, which leverages the Rowhammer effect in DRAM modules - the Rowhammer PUF. Our PUF makes use of bit flips, which occur in DRAM cells due to rapid and repeated access of DRAM rows. Prior research has mainly focused on Rowhammer attacks, where the Rowhammer effect is used to illegitimately alter data stored in memory, e.g., to change page table entries or enable privilege escalation attacks. Meanwhile, this is the first work to use the Rowhammer effect in a positive context - to design a novel PUF. We extensively evaluate the Rowhammer PUF using commercial, off-the-shelf devices, not relying on custom hardware or an FPGA-based setup. The evaluation shows that the Rowhammer PUF holds required properties needed for the envisioned security applications, and could be deployed today. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email