Coded Modulation and Shaping for Multivalued Physical Unclonable Functions

In this paper, a coded modulation scheme employing signal shaping is proposed and designed for use in multi-valued physical unclonable functions (PUFs). In the literature, usually binary PUFs are considered, where less than one bit of entropy is extracted from each fundamental building block (PUF node). This randomness in the hardware may then be used for the derivation of cryptographic keys. Meanwhile, PUFs over higher-order alphabets, so-called multi-valued PUFs (MVPUFs) have been presented. Typically, symbols from a higher-order alphabet are extracted by suited quantization. In contrast, in this paper we propose a coded modulation scheme which directly works on the analog values provided by the PUF nodes. We establish an interpretation as digital transmission with randomness at the transmitter, and thereon calculate the respective capacities of bit levels for the Gaussian distributed reference PUF readout in additive Gaussian noise. In addition, the metric for optimum soft-decision decoding is derived. Thereby, the coded modulation scheme can be designed for the present situation. A helper data scheme adapted to the given situation is proposed and analyzed. Moreover, on top of the multilevel coding scheme, we employ signal shaping for the first time in the context of PUFs. In particular, trellis shaping is applied. By this, the coded modulation scheme can be perfectly matched to the PUF statistics. This is reflected by the results of conducted numerical simulations. High coding rates can be used, i.e., a large entropy per PUF node can be extracted, with very high reliabilities.