TERORO - Transient Effect Ring Oscillator and Ring Oscillator Configurable Hybrid PUF

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are widely used as a primitive in cryptographic circuits. They provide several utilities such as authentication or secret-key generation and storage by extracting some unique information from the manufacturing variations among several instances of the same circuit. Ring Oscillators (ROs) and Transient Effect Ring Oscillators (TEROs) have been proposed in the literature for implementing PUFs. In this paper a new proposal for a PUF design is presented based on the combination of the two previously mentioned oscillators to make a hybrid structure called "TERORO" (TERO + RO). The proposed architecture uses this structure as the main building block and several evaluation methods to make a configurable PUF.