Ring Oscillator Physical Unclonable Function with Multi Level Supply Voltages
This addresses security and efficiency issues for hardware security applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing RO-PUF designs.
The paper tackles the problem of limited challenge/response pairs and reliability in ring oscillator physical unclonable functions (RO-PUFs) by designing a new type where inverters are supplied by different voltages, resulting in increased pairs, lower area consumption, and improved temperature reliability.
One of the most common types of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) is the ring oscillator PUF (RO-PUF), in which the output bits are obtained by comparing the oscillation frequencies of different ring oscillators. In this paper we design a new type of ring oscillator PUF in which the different inverters composing the ring oscillators can be supplied by different voltages. The new RO-PUF can be used to (1) increase the maximum number of possible challenge/response pairs produced by the PUF; (2) generate a high number of bits while consuming a low area; (3) improve the reliability of the PUF in case of temperature variations. We present the basic idea of the new RO-PUF and then discuss its applications.