STT-DPSA: Digital PUF-Based Secure AuthenticationUsing STT-MRAM for the Internet of Things

Physical unclonable function (PUF), a hardware-efficient approach, has drawn a lot ofattention in the security research community for exploiting the inevitable manufacturing variabilityof integrated circuits (IC) as the unique fingerprint of each IC. However, analog PUF is notrobust and resistant to environmental conditions. In this paper, we propose a digital PUF-basedsecure authentication model using the emergent spin-transfer torque magnetic random-accessmemory (STT-MRAM) PUF (called STT-DPSA for short). STT-DPSA is an original secure identityauthentication architecture for Internet of Things (IoT) devices to devise a computationallylightweight authentication architecture which is not susceptible to environmental conditions.Considering hardware security level or cell area, we alternatively build matrix multiplication orstochastic logic operation for our authentication model. To prove the feasibility of our model, thereliability of our PUF is validated via the working windows between temperature interval (-35 °C,110 °C) and Vdd interval [0.95 V, 1.16 V] and STT-DPSA is implemented with parameters n = 32,i = o = 1024, k = 8, and l = 2 using FPGA design flow. Under this setting of parameters, an attackerneeds to take time complexity O(2²⁵⁶) to compromise STT-DPSA. We also evaluate STT-DPSA usingSynopsys design compiler with TSMC 0.18 um process.