Interleaved Challenge Loop PUF: A Highly Side-Channel Protected Oscillator-Based PUF

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) leverage manufacturing variations to generate device-specific keys during runtime only, overcoming the need for protection after power-off as for Non-Volatile Memory. The main challenges of PUF-based key storage are reliability of the response and sensitivity to Side-Channel Analysis (SCA). Oscillator-based PUFs are particularly sensitive to frequency spectrum SCA. Existing countermeasures can protect sign-based bit derivation that requires error correction or discarding unreliable bits to achieve reliable key generation. Amplitude-based bit derivation enhances the reliability of oscillator-based PUFs without discarding unsteady response bits, keeping a high entropy. However, existing lightweight countermeasures against SCA are not applicable for this case. This raises the demand for an alternative solution. This work targets the protection of amplitude-based bit derivation combined with the Loop PUF, an oscillator-based PUF primitive well suited for key generation. It presents the Interleaved Challenge Loop PUF (ICLooPUF), a side-channel-hardened offspring of the Loop PUF that uses dynamic challenge interleaving. The SCA-protected PUF primitive is applicable to amplitude-based and sign-based bit derivation methods, and requires a low hardware overhead. Theoretical and experimental results show the efficiency of the protection mechanism.