A weak FPGA physically unclonable function using multiple-parallel single delay-line based time-to-digital converters with linearity self-calibration
1 Department of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Fukuoka University, Fukuoka, Japan
2 Gunma University, Kiryu, Japan
Abstract

This paper presents a Weak Field-Programmable Gate Array Physically Unclonable Function (FPGA PUF) using Multiple Parallel Single Delay-Line based Time-to-Digital Converter (MPSDL-TDC) on FPGA. In the measurement mode, the proposed PUF works as a high-resolution FPGA TDC with the MPSDL-TDCs. In the PUF mode, the proposed PUF selects a stage of a TDC in the MPSDL-TDC and another stage of another TDC in it. Next, we calculate the buffer delays of the selected stages with the linearity self-calibration. Finally, we obtain a 1-bit response output by comparing the buffer delays. With a small amount of circuit, the proposed PUF can be applied to any type of MPSDL-TDCs, even it is the one with Look-Up Table (LUT) chain based TDCs or with the dedicated carry-chains based TDCs. Consequently, the number of the extra resources for the proposed PUF is small. Evaluation using 10 Artix-7 FPGAs resulted in an inter-chip Hamming distance of 47.07%, a reliability of 93.91%, and a uniformity of 50.70%. Minimum resource overhead for the proposed PUF over original MDSDL-TDCs is 4.99%.

Keywords

PUF; weak PUF; hardware security; TDC; FPGA; MPSDL-TDC

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