Abstract
The Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) is a promising hardware security primitive with a wide range of applications, such as secure key generation, device authentication, IP protection, and hardware entangled cryptography. Due to their physical construction, PUF responses are inherently noisy. Error correction codes can be used to turn noisy PUF responses into keys or static values for these applications. However, a general construction of error correction is expensive and could introduce high entropy loss for PUFs with high error rates. Some PUF pre-processing techniques have been proposed, such as temporal majority voting and dark bit schemes, applied before error correction. In this paper, we introduce a simple and yet effective method to reduce PUF error rate called Spatial Majority Voting (SMV). The idea is to group PUF bits together to produce a single, more stable bit from the group. Experimental data show that SMV works very well, reducing the mean error rate from 6.5% to 0.3% with a group size of 9 on SRAM PUFs implemented in 65 nm CMOS. We also show that SMV can be combined with the dark bits method to further reduce the error rate to less than 0.01%, thus avoiding the need for expensive error correction schemes.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Armknecht, F., Maes, R., Sadeghi, A.-R., Sunar, B., Tuyls, P.: Memory leakage-resilient encryption based on physically unclonable functions. In: Matsui, M. (ed.) ASIACRYPT 2009. LNCS, vol. 5912, pp. 685–702. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Böhm, C., Hofer, M., Pribyl, W.: A microcontroller SRAM-PUF. In: 5th International Conference on Network and System Security, pp. 269–273. IEEE (2011)
Bösch, C., Guajardo, J., Sadeghi, A.-R., Shokrollahi, J., Tuyls, P.: Efficient helper data key extractor on FPGAs. In: Oswald, E., Rohatgi, P. (eds.) CHES 2008. LNCS, vol. 5154, pp. 181–197. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Brzuska, C., Fischlin, M., Schröder, H., Katzenbeisser, S.: Physically uncloneable functions in the universal composition framework. In: Rogaway, P. (ed.) CRYPTO 2011. LNCS, vol. 6841, pp. 51–70. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Dodis, Y., Reyzin, L., Smith, A.: Fuzzy extractors: How to generate strong keys from biometrics and other noisy data. In: Cachin, C., Camenisch, J.L. (eds.) EUROCRYPT 2004. LNCS, vol. 3027, pp. 523–540. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Gassend, B., Clarke, D., van Dijk, M., Devadas, S.: Silicon physical random functions. In: ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 148–160. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Guajardo, J., Kumar, S.S., Schrijen, G.-J., Tuyls, P.: FPGA Intrinsic PUFs and Their Use for IP Protection. In: Paillier, P., Verbauwhede, I. (eds.) CHES 2007. LNCS, vol. 4727, pp. 63–80. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Juels, A., Wattenberg, M.: A fuzzy commitment scheme. In: ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), pp. 28–36. ACM (1999)
Katzenbeisser, S., Kocabaş, Ü., Rožić, V., Sadeghi, A.-R., Verbauwhede, I., Wachsmann, C.: PUFs: Myth, fact or busted? A security evaluation of physically unclonable functions (PUFs) cast in silicon. In: Prouff, E., Schaumont, P. (eds.) CHES 2012. LNCS, vol. 7428, pp. 283–301. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Koeberl, P., Li, J., Rajan, A., Vishik, C., Wu, W.: A practical device authentication scheme using SRAM PUFS. In: McCune, J.M., Balacheff, B., Perrig, A., Sadeghi, A.-R., Sasse, A., Beres, Y. (eds.) TRUST 2011. LNCS, vol. 6740, pp. 63–77. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Kumar, S.S., Guajardo, J., Maes, R., Schrijen, G.J., Tuyls, P.: The butterfly PUF: Protecting IP on every FPGA. In: IEEE International Workshop on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), pp. 67–70 (June 2008)
Lee, J.W., Lim, D., Gassend, B., Edward Suh, G., van Dijk, M., Devadas, S.: A technique to build a secret key in integrated circuits for identification and authentication application. In: Proceedings of the Symposium on VLSI Circuits, pp. 176–179 (2004)
van der Leest, V., Preneel, B., van der Sluis, E.: Soft decision error correction for compact memory-based PUFS using a single enrollment. In: Prouff, E., Schaumont, P. (eds.) CHES 2012. LNCS, vol. 7428, pp. 268–282. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Lim, D., Lee, J.W., Gassend, B., Edward Suh, G., van Dijk, M., Devadas, S.: Extracting secret keys from integrated circuits. IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems 13(10), 1200–1205 (2005)
Maes, R., Rozic, V., Verbauwhede, I., Koeberl, P., van der Sluis, E., van der Leest, V.: Experimental evaluation of physically unclonable functions in 65 nm cmos. In: 2012 Proceedings of the ESSCIRC (ESSCIRC), pp. 486–489 (September 2012)
Maes, R., Van Herrewege, A., Verbauwhede, I.: PUFKY: A fully functional PUF-based cryptographic key generator. In: Prouff, E., Schaumont, P. (eds.) CHES 2012. LNCS, vol. 7428, pp. 302–319. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Maes, R., Tuyls, P., Verbauwhede, I.: Intrinsic PUFs from flip-flops on reconfigurable devices. In: 3rd Benelux Workshop on Information and System Security (WISSec 2008), Eindhoven, NL, p. 17 (2008)
Maes, R., Tuyls, P., Verbauwhede, I.: Low-overhead implementation of a soft decision helper data algorithm for SRAM PUFs. In: Clavier, C., Gaj, K. (eds.) CHES 2009. LNCS, vol. 5747, pp. 332–347. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Pappu, R.S.: Physical one-way functions. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (March 2001)
Simons, P., van der Sluis, E., van der Leest, V.: Buskeeper PUFs, a promising alternative to D Flip-Flop PUFs. In: 2012 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), pp. 7–12 (June 2012)
Simpson, E., Schaumont, P.: Offline hardware/Software authentication for reconfigurable platforms. In: Goubin, L., Matsui, M. (eds.) CHES 2006. LNCS, vol. 4249, pp. 311–323. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Edward Suh, G., Devadas, S.: Physical unclonable functions for device authentication and secret key generation. In: Design Automation Conference, pp. 9–14. ACM Press, New York (2007)
Yu, M.-D., Devadas, S.: Secure and robust error correction for physical unclonable functions. IEEE Design Test of Computers 27(1), 48–65 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Koeberl, P., Li, J., Wu, W. (2013). A Spatial Majority Voting Technique to Reduce Error Rate of Physically Unclonable Functions. In: Bloem, R., Lipp, P. (eds) Trusted Systems. INTRUST 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8292. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03491-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03491-1_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-03490-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-03491-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)