STT-DPSA: Digital PUF-Based Secure Authentication Using STT-MRAM for the Internet of Things

• Main Authors: Wei-Chen Chien, Yu-Chian Chang, Yao-Tung Tsou, Sy-Yen Kuo, Ching-Ray Chang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-05-01
• Series: Micromachines
• Subjects: physical unclonable function (PUF); spin-transfer torque magnetic random-access memory (STT-MRAM); identity authentication; hardware security; internet of things
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-666X/11/5/502

Physical unclonable function (PUF), a hardware-efficient approach, has drawn a lot of<br />attention in the security research community for exploiting the inevitable manufacturing variability<br />of integrated circuits (IC) as the unique fingerprint of each IC. However, analog PUF is not<br />robust and resistant to environmental conditions. In this paper, we propose a digital PUF-based<br />secure authentication model using the emergent spin-transfer torque magnetic random-access<br />memory (STT-MRAM) PUF (called STT-DPSA for short). STT-DPSA is an original secure identity<br />authentication architecture for Internet of Things (IoT) devices to devise a computationally<br />lightweight authentication architecture which is not susceptible to environmental conditions.<br />Considering hardware security level or cell area, we alternatively build matrix multiplication or<br />stochastic logic operation for our authentication model. To prove the feasibility of our model, the<br />reliability of our PUF is validated via the working windows between temperature interval (−35 °C,<br />110 °C) and Vdd interval [0.95 V, 1.16 V] and STT-DPSA is implemented with parameters <em>n</em> = 32,<br /><em>i</em> <em>= o =</em> 1024, <em>k</em> = 8, and <em>l</em> = 2 using FPGA design flow. Under this setting of parameters, an attacker<br />needs to take time complexity O(2²⁵⁶) to compromise STT-DPSA. We also evaluate STT-DPSA using<br />Synopsys design compiler with TSMC 0.18 um process.