Intrinsic PUF Instance on Non-Volatile NAND Flash Memory
This work addresses security concerns for embedded systems and IoT devices by exploring intrinsic physical unclonable functions (PUFs) on non-volatile memory, but it appears incremental as it focuses on experimental observations without major breakthroughs.
The paper tackled the problem of hardware security in IoT devices by investigating program disturbance in SLC NAND flash memory, finding that intra-page disturbance is easier to produce than inter-page disturbance and that disturbance difficulty increases with page number from 0 to 63.
Embedded systems or micro controller based modules have become increasingly prevalent in our daily lives. However, the security of embedded devices as well as the authenticity of hardware has become an increasing concern within the growing Internet of Things (IoT) space. In this paper we setup an experiment environment where SLC flash program disturbance is observed. We discovered that intra-page disturbance is easier to be produced than inter-page disturbance. We also observed that adjacent pages are paired in (2n, 2n+1) manner, and disturbance only occurs within a pair. Lastly, we found that as page number increases from 0 to 63, it becomes more difficult to observe the first bit flip within a page, and thus more difficult to achieve the disturbance stable state.