PreLatPUF: Exploiting DRAM Latency Variations for Generating Robust Device Signatures
This addresses the need for faster, non-destructive, and less disruptive security blocks for low-cost cryptographic applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing DRAM-based PUF approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of slow, destructive, and disruptive device signature generation from DRAM for cryptographic applications by proposing PreLatPUF, which exploits DRAM precharge latency variations. The result is a technique that is at least ~1,192X faster than existing approaches while reliably reproducing keys under extreme conditions.
Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are potential security blocks to generate unique and more secure keys in low-cost cryptographic applications. Dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) has been proposed as one of the promising candidates for generating robust keys. Unfortunately, the existing techniques of generating device signatures from DRAM is very slow, destructive (destroy the current data), and disruptive to system operation. In this paper, we propose \textit{precharge} latency-based PUF (PreLatPUF) that exploits DRAM \textit{precharge} latency variations to generate signatures. The proposed PreLatPUF is fast, robust, least disruptive, and non-destructive. The silicon results from commercially available $DDR3$ chips from different manufacturers show that the proposed key generation technique is at least $ \sim 1,192X$ faster than the existing approaches, while reliably reproducing the key in extreme operating conditions.