Ring Oscillator PUF and Blockchain: A Way of Securing Post Fabrication FPGA Supply Chain

Due to increasing demand of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in different sectors and applications, counterfeit and recycled FPGAs are making their way into the FPGA supply chain. Recent bottlenecks and impediments in the global supply chain of semiconductor chips have further compounded this problem. Counterfeit and recycled FPGAs are not reliable and can cause failures in the operation of critical infrastructures in which they may be installed. Furthermore, they are likely to be more vulnerable to security threats such as hardware Trojan insertion, etc. In this paper, a technique to secure the post fabrication FPGA supply chain using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and blockchain technology is presented to address this problem. Also, a case study with simulation results is included to illustrate the technique. The simulation for the proposed model is conducted on Ganache framework provided by Truffle suite. With this technique, a user can not only determine the authenticity of the FPGA but can also identify the guilty party in the supply chain responsible for the untrustful act.