Multiple Frequency Slots Based Physical Unclonable Functions

Recently, we begin to focus on the safety of IC products, traditional cryptography becomes unable to protect it perfect because of the more sophisticated attack methods. Physical unclonable functions(PUFs for short) is proposed for its important role in the domain because of its unique property.Delay-based silicon PUF makes use of uncontrollable things in the process, it is embedded in the device and exists in the format of challenge-response pairs(CPRs), hence overcoming the difficulty of storing the secret key. This paper analysis the drawback of the traditional RO-based PUF and propose a new construct. Firstly, we propose an experiment to prove the relativity between the frequence of RO and the manufacture process. Then we design an configurable RO, each RO’s frequency changes from one to another after generating one response bit. In each frequency, ROs differ from each other because of the uncontrollable difference in manufacture and there exists a frequency slot. In the whole system, many frequency slots exist and the transfer between them are unpredictable, this makes us get more challenge-response pairs(CRPs for short), what’s more, the system is more unpredictable. Compared with the traditional RO based PUF, it is more difficult for the attacker to model this system. This architecture not only ensures the uniqueness and reliability, but also increases the safety of itself.