Paper 2016/1031

A Multiplexer based Arbiter PUF Composition with Enhanced Reliability and Security

Durga Prasad Sahoo, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, Rajat Subhra Chakraborty, and Phuong Ha Nguyen

Abstract

Arbiter Physically Unclonable Function (APUF), while being relatively lightweight, is extremely vulnerable to modeling attacks. Hence, various compositions of APUFs such as XOR APUF and Lightweight Secure PUF have been proposed to be secure alternatives. Previous research has demonstrated that PUF compositions have two major challenges to overcome: vulnerability against modeling and statistical attacks, and lack of reliability. In this paper, we introduce a multiplexer based composition of APUFs, denoted as MPUF, to simultaneously overcome these challenges. In addition to the basic MPUF design, we propose two MPUF variants namely cMPUF and rMPUF to improve robustness against cryptanalysis and reliability based modeling attack, respectively. The rMPUF demonstrates enhanced robustness against reliability based modeling attack, while even the well-known XOR APUF, otherwise robust to machine learning based modeling attacks, has been modeled using the same technique with linear data and time complexities. The rMPUF can provide a good trade-off between security and hardware overhead while maintaining a significantly higher reliability level than any practical XOR APUF instance. Moreover, MPUF variants are the first APUF compositions, to the best of our knowledge, that can achieve Strict Avalanche Criterion without any additional hardware. Finally, we validate our theoretical findings using Matlab-based simulations of MPUFs.