DCDC PUF an enhanced implementation of ring oscillator based PUF.

Area of Science:

• Integrated circuit design
• Hardware security
• Semiconductor technology

Background:

• Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are crucial for secure key generation.
• Power Management Units (PMUs) are integral to modern System-on-Chip (SoC) designs for power efficiency.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and evaluate an enhanced PUF design by integrating a voltage regulator from a PMU.
• To improve PUF security and performance using existing on-chip components.

Main Methods:

• Design of a novel PUF system utilizing a PMU's voltage regulator in 22-nm FDSOI technology.
• Statistical analysis based on silicon measurements of 8K challenge-response pairs from three chips.

Main Results:

• The enhanced PUF achieved 50% diffuseness (31% improvement) and 48% uniformity.
• Demonstrated superior resilience against machine learning attacks with 50.5% prediction accuracy compared to 67.1% for standalone PUFs.

Conclusions:

• Integrating PMU voltage regulators offers a viable method to enhance PUF security and performance.
• The proposed PUF design provides improved statistical properties and robustness against adversarial attacks.