Design and FPGA Implementation of a Password Management System Utilizing RO PUF

Traditional password mechanisms are often implemented through software combined with relatively mature encryption algorithms. Unfortunately, even with passwords of considerable complexity, hackers can still compromise password mechanisms through various attacks. To address these issues, this paper proposes a password management system based on RO PUF. By introducing the hardware security primitive Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) into the system, the PUF's non-cloning theorem, uniqueness, and unpredictability are leveraged to protect user data from hardware-level compromises. An example running on a Matlab + FPGA software-hardware co-design platform is provided, and the system is evaluated from the perspectives of security and practicality. Finally, a comparison is made with other password mechanisms. The results indicate that the proposed design has advantages in security, while retaining usability benefits in terms of lightweight design, user-friendliness, and portability.