Tv-Puf : A Fast Lightweight Analog Physical Unclonable Function

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is the hardware counterpart of a one-way function. It is capable of addressing hardware security issues such as device authentication, secret key generation for cryptographic protocols, producing seeds for Random Number Generators and much more. In this paper, we propose a design of an aging resistant, lightweight and low-power analog PUF which exploits the susceptibility of Threshold Voltage (V-th) of MOSFETs to process variations. Analyses of this Threshold Voltage PUF (TV-PUF) show improvements in power consumption, reliability and anti-aging properties over the contemporary PUF designs. Improvements have also been observed in security parameters like uniformity, reliability and uniqueness for 64-bit key generation over the existing PUF schemes. At 1 GHz clock input for the sense amplifier, our design consumes 0.18 mu W/bit power with 50% uniqueness and 50% uniformity. Moreover, it has been seen that the performance of this PUF is independent of the technology node in which it is being used, i.e., it gives high performance in 45nm, 65nm and 90nm technology nodes. Aging analysis of the TV-PUF shows that the reliability of our PUF remains unaffected by aging of the device.