A Compact and Low Power RO PUF with High Resilience to the EM Side-Channel Attack and the SVM Modelling Attack of Wireless Sensor Networks

Authentication is a crucial security service for the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in versatile domains. The deployment of WSN devices in the untrusted open environment and the resource-constrained nature make the on-chip authentication an open challenge. The strong physical unclonable function (PUF) came in handy as light-weight authentication security primitive. In this paper, we present the first ring oscillator (RO) based strong physical unclonable function (PUF) with high resilience to both the electromagnetic (EM) side-channel attack and the support vector machine (SVM) modelling attack. By employing an RO based PUF architecture with the current starved inverter as the delay cell, the oscillation power is significantly reduced to minimize the emitted EM signal, leading to greatly enhanced immunity to the EM side-channel analysis attack. In addition, featuring superior reconfigurability due to the conspicuously simplified circuitries, the proposed implementation is capable of withstanding the SVM modelling attack by generating and comparing a large number of RO frequency pairs. The reported experimental results validate the prototype of a 9-stage RO PUF fabricated using standard 65 nm complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process. Operating at the supply voltage of 1.2 V and the frequency of 100 KHz, the fabricated RO PUF occupies a compact silicon area of 250 [Formula: see text] m [Formula: see text] and consumes a power as low as 5.16 [Formula: see text] W per challenge-response pair (CRP). Furthermore, the uniqueness and the worst-case reliability are measured to be 50.17% and 98.30% for the working temperature range of −40∼120 [Formula: see text] C and the supply voltage variation of ±2%, respectively. Thus, the proposed PUF is applicable for the low power, low cost and secure WSN communications.