A Morphable Physically Unclonable Function and True Random Number Generator Using a Commercial Magnetic Memory

We use commercial magnetic memory to realize morphable security primitives, a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) and a True Random Number Generator (TRNG). The PUF realized by manipulating the write time and the TRNG is realized by tweaking the number of write pulses. Our analysis indicates that m...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mohammad Nasim Imtiaz Khan, Chak Yuen Cheng, Sung Hao Lin, Abdullah Ash-Saki, Swaroop Ghosh
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-01-01
Series:Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications
Subjects:
PUF
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9268/11/1/5
Description
Summary:We use commercial magnetic memory to realize morphable security primitives, a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) and a True Random Number Generator (TRNG). The PUF realized by manipulating the write time and the TRNG is realized by tweaking the number of write pulses. Our analysis indicates that more than 75% bits in the PUF are unusable without any correction due to their inability to exhibit any randomness. We exploit temporal randomness of working columns to fix the unusable columns and write latency to fix the unusable rows during the enrollment. The intra-HD, inter-HD, energy, bandwidth and area of the proposed PUF are found to be 0, 46.25%, 0.14 pJ/bit, 0.34 Gbit/s and 0.385 μm<sup>2</sup>/bit (including peripherals) respectively. The proposed TRNG provides all possible outcomes with a standard deviation of 0.0062, correlation coefficient of 0.05 and an entropy of 0.95. The energy, bandwidth and area of the proposed TRNG is found to be 0.41 pJ/bit, 0.12 Gbit/s and 0.769 μm<sup>2</sup>/bit (including peripherals). The performance of the proposed TRNG has also been tested with NIST test suite. The proposed designs are compared with other magnetic PUFs and TRNGs from other literature.
ISSN:2079-9268