Switchable Chain Configurable RO PUF for Enhancing Hardware Security of IoT Devices

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is a hardware security primitive that acts like a fingerprint of a device and extracts the intrinsic characteristics of a chip. The PUF provides a secure approach for key generation and authentication. One of the efficient categories of silicon PUFs is Ring Oscillator PUFs. The field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are proper platforms for implementing flexible PUF designs such as config-urable ring oscillators. In this work, we present a flexible and compact ring oscillator as SCCRO (Switchable Chain Config-urable Ring Oscillator), which could generate a high number of CRPs (Challenge Response Pairs) compared to its occupied area. The resistance of our proposed PUF is evaluated using logistic regression (LR) as a powerful machine learning attack technique. The experimental results are gained using Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA boards and show satisfactory uniformity, uniqueness, and reliability for the SCCRO PUF.