Design Exploration and Security Assessment of PUF-on-PUF Implementations

Abstract: We design, implement, and assess the security of several variations of the PUF-on-PUF (POP) architecture. We perform extensive experiments with deep neural networks (DNNs), showing results that endorse its resilience to learning attacks when using APUFs with 6, or more, stages in the first layer. Compositions using APUFs with 2, and 4 stages are shown vulnerable to DNN attacks. We reflect on such results, extending previous techniques of influential bits to assess stage bias in APUF instances. Our data shows that compositions not always preserve security properties of PUFs, the size of PUFs used plays a crucial role. We implemented a testchip in 65 nm CMOS to obtain accurate measurements of uniformity, uniqueness, and response stability for our POP implementations. Measurement results show that minimum bit error rate is obtained when using APUFs with 8 stages in the first layer, while fewer APUF stages lead to a large spread of bit error rate across different chips.