Experimental Characterization of Physical Unclonable Function Based on 1 kb Resistive Random Access Memory Arrays | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

Experimental Characterization of Physical Unclonable Function Based on 1 kb Resistive Random Access Memory Arrays


Abstract:

In this letter, we propose a reliable design of physical unclonable function (PUF) exploiting resistive random access memory (RRAM). Unlike the conventional silicon PUFs ...Show More

Abstract:

In this letter, we propose a reliable design of physical unclonable function (PUF) exploiting resistive random access memory (RRAM). Unlike the conventional silicon PUFs based on manufacturing process variation, the randomness of RRAM PUF comes from the stochastic switching mechanism and intrinsic variability of the RRAM devices. RRAM PUF's characteristics, such as uniqueness and reliability, are evaluated on 1 kb HfO2-based 1-transistor-1-resistor (1T1R) arrays. Our experimental results show that the selection of the reference current significantly affects the uniqueness. More dummy cells to generate the reference can improve the uniqueness of RRAM. The reliability of RRAM PUF is determined by the RRAM data retention. A new design is proposed where the sum of the readout currents of multiple RRAM cells is used for generating one response bit, which statistically minimizes the risk of early lifetime failure. The experimental results show that with eight cells per bit, the retention time is more than 50 h at 150 °C or equivalently 10 years at 69 °C. This experimental work demonstrates that RRAM PUF is a viable technology for hardware security primitive with inter-Hamming distance 49.8% and intra-Hamming distance 0%.
Published in: IEEE Electron Device Letters ( Volume: 36, Issue: 12, December 2015)
Page(s): 1380 - 1383
Date of Publication: 30 October 2015

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I. Introduction

Oxide-based RRAM is an emerging nonvolatile memory (NVM) candidate [1]. However, it has a large variability in resistance distribution because of the stochastic switching mechanism involving oxygen vacancies’ generation and migration, which adds significant design challenges for NVM applications. On the other hand, hardware security applications generally embrace truly random variations. Here we leverage RRAM’s variability to design a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF). PUF has been used for device authentication and key generation [2]. PUF has two primary requirements that need to be satisfied: uniqueness and reliability [3]. Uniqueness means that the responses resulting from evaluating the same challenge on different PUF instances should be different, i.e., the inter-Hamming distance (HD) of the response bits should be close to 50%. Reliability means that responses resulting from evaluating the same challenge on the same PUF instance should be similar, i.e., the intra-Hamming distance (HD) between the response bits should be close to 0%.

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