Clockless physical unclonable functions

  • Authors:
  • Julian Murphy

  • Affiliations:
  • Centre for Secure Information Technologies, Queens University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • TRUST'12 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Trust and Trustworthy Computing
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) exploit the physical characteristics of silicon and provide an alternative to storing digital encryption keys in non-volatile memory. A PUF maps a unique set of digital inputs to a corresponding set of digital outputs. In this paper, the use of asynchronous logic and design techniques to implement PUFs is advocated for Asynchronous Physically Unclonable Functions (APUFs). A new method of using asynchronous rings to implement PUFs is described called AsyncPUF which features inherent field programmability. It is a novel and holistic PUF design compared to the existing state-of-the-art as it naturally addresses the two challenges facing PUFs to-date that prevent wide-spread adoption: robustness and entropy. Results of electrical simulation in a 90 nano-metre lithography process are presented and discussed.