Threshold Voltage Based Memristor Crossbar PUF
While technologies are adopting smart objects, which are moving toward Internet of Things (IoT), data security and privacy are becoming essentials. IoT security plays a crucial role in a world where smart devices are interconnected at every level, from wearable to home and building automation to smart cities and infrastructure, to smart industries, and to smart things. Since the interconnection involves all types of IoT devices, any vulnerability in one of these devices can give intrusion access to the network. On the other hand, many of those devices have a lack of security layers due to low marginal cost constraints. Also, some of these devices are power constrained and operate on harvested energy, hence requiring low design complexity. This opens doors to adversaries to exploit vulnerabilities in the most primitive device and create access channels to the network. So this makes security a big challenge to hardware developers.
A low-power, low-cost, and low-complexity security overhead solution must be integrated to ensure adequate security resilience. Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) comes in handy as an emerging lightweight hardware security primitive for key management and device authentication.
PUFs utilize the permenant physical fingerprint of the devices originating from stochastic variations that are randomly generated during the manufacturing process of the devices, which cannot be reproduced even if the process is the same as that of the original manufacturer. The unique physical properties makes the device unique. PUF exploits those uncontrolled device parameters. The set of the input and output of PUF is called challenge-response pairs (CRP). The mapping of the CRPs of different PUF (devices) instances are expected to be different from each other. Many silicon-based PUFs have been proposed over the years. One of the emerging PUF designs is based on a memristor due to the advantages of low power, area, and security. A memristor is a device that was discovered by Chua. The device stores iii digital data in the form of two states, high resistance (π ππΉπΉ) and low resistance (π ππ), each of the states can be reached when an applied electric voltage across its terminals crosses their corresponding threshold voltages. Recently memristors cross bars were used as PUF by exploiting π ππ and π ππΉπΉ errors to generate a random output bit stream. These crossbars use comparators to select PUF output based on voltage difference.
Comparators are known to be power-hungry components and occupy a relatively large area. We propose a comparator-less crossbar PUF which is based on the memristorβs threshold voltage entropy, which was due to manufacturing process variations. Sneak path current is the main challenge of crossbars, It adds a parallel equivalent resistance to the selected one, which causes wrong readings. We propose uni-directional memristors and demonstrate that our proposed crossbar PUF is a sneak path resistance. A transparent PUF core output can be modeled for attacks. An extra security layer which is low power is integrated into the system to scramble PUF output.
History
Language
- English
Publication Year
- 2023
License statement
Β© The author. The author has granted HBKU and Qatar Foundation a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free license to reproduce, display and distribute the manuscript in whole or in part in any form to be posted in digital or print format and made available to the public at no charge. Unless otherwise specified in the copyright statement or the metadata, all rights are reserved by the copyright holder. For permission to reuse content, please contact the author.Institution affiliated with
- Hamad Bin Khalifa University
- College of Science and Engineering - HBKU
Degree Date
- 2023
Degree Type
- Doctorate