International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 18 November 2015

Cedric Marchand, Lilian Bossuet, AbdelKarim Cherkaoui
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Physical unclonable functions (PUF) are a promising approach in design for trust and security. A PUF derives a unique identifier for different similar dies using some of their physical characteristics, so it can be used to authenticate chips and to fight against counterfeiting and theft of devices. The transient effect ring oscillator (TERO) PUF is based on the extraction of the entropy of the process variations by comparison between TERO cells characteristics. This TERO cells need to be carefully designed in order to construct a PUF. This task need to be done with precision especially in the size of used gates and in the delays of all connections inside the element which is particularly challenging in FPGA. This paper presents the design of TERO cells in two FPGA families: Xilinx Spartan 6 and Altera Cyclone V. In addition, the result of the characterization of the TERO-PUF are compared for the two technologies.

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