Determining the quality metrics for PUFs and performance evaluation of Two RO-PUFs

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are circuit primitives that generate chip specific signatures depending on the uncontrollable components present in the manufacturing process. Authentication, key generation and IP protection are three important usage areas of PUF circuits. Beside unclonability, uniqueness and robustness are the main properties that every PUF should provide. Although a number of PUF types are presented in the literature, standard and satisfactory performance evaluation metrics for these properties or testing methodologies have not been proposed yet. In this work a complete set of quality metrics have been developed for a fair and detailed performance evaluation of PUFs. Secondly, a testing methodology is proposed and confidence interval and confidence level concepts are adopted to PUF evaluation in order to maintain the reliability of the results. We have implemented two Ring Oscillator(RO) based PUF circuits on FPGA and evaluated their performance in varying environmental conditions in detail, according to the quality metrics that are proposed.