Secure ECDSA SRAM-PUF Based on Universal Single/Double Scalar Multiplication Architecture

Area of Science:

• Cybersecurity and Cryptography
• Hardware Security and Embedded Systems

Background:

• Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) provide unique device identifiers crucial for cybersecurity.
• SRAM-PUFs are widely used due to their simple implementation, often employing soft-decision Reed-Muller (RM) codes.
• Existing RM code designs face potential security risks from soft-decision attack algorithms.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a soft-decision Reed-Muller (RM) code attack algorithm to expose security vulnerabilities.
• To propose a novel soft-decision SRAM-PUF structure secured by the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA).
• To enhance the processing speed and hardware efficiency of the secure SRAM-PUF.

Main Methods:

• Developed a custom ECDSA scheme for improved processing speed.
• Proposed a universal architecture for elliptic curve scalar multiplication (ECSM) and elliptic curve double scalar multiplication (ECDSM) using differential addition chains (DAC).
• Implemented the design on FPGA (Xilinx Virtex-7) and ASIC (TSMC 40 nm).

Main Results:

• Achieved a significantly lower bit error rate (2.7×10-10) compared to existing methods.
• Demonstrated superior area-time performance with 3902 slices and 6.615 μs ECDSM latency.
• The universal architecture for ECSM/ECDSM operations effectively saves hardware resources.

Conclusions:

• The proposed soft-decision SRAM-PUF with custom ECDSA offers enhanced security against RM code attacks.
• The differential addition chain-based universal architecture provides efficient and resource-saving hardware implementation.
• This research presents a promising advancement in secure and high-performance hardware security solutions.