PHYSICAL UNCLONABLE FUNCTION USING AUGMENTED MEMORY FOR CHALLENGE-RESPONSE HASHING

摘要

A technique is presented for performing a physical unclonable function (PUF) using an array of SRAM cells. The technique can be viewed as an attempt to read multiple cells in a column at the same time, creating contention that is resolved according to process variation. An authentication challenge is issued to the array of SRAM cells by activating two or more wordlines concurrently. The response is simply the value that the SRAM produces from a read operation when the challenge condition is applied. The number of challenges that can be applied the array of SRAM cells grows exponentially with the number of SRAM rows and these challenges can be applied at any time without power cycling.

主权项

1. A method for performing a physical unclonable function using an array of static random-access memory (SRAM) cells, comprising
providing an array of SRAM cells arranged in rows and columns, where SRAM cells in each row in the array share a common wordline and SRAM cells in each column in the array share common bitlines; issuing an authentication challenge to the array of SRAM cells by activating two or more wordlines concurrently; and detecting, in response to the authentication challenge, an output for each column of the array, where the outputs collectively form a response to the authentication challenge.