Mathematical Model of Strong Physically Unclonable Functions Based on Hybrid Boolean Networks

Abstract: We introduce a mathematical framework for simulating Hybrid Boolean Network (HBN) Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs, HBN-PUFs). We verify that the model is able to reproduce the experimentally observed PUF statistics for uniqueness $\mu_{inter}$ and reliability $\mu_{intra}$ obtained from experiments of HBN-PUFs on Cyclone V FPGAs. Our results suggest that the HBN-PUF is a true `strong' PUF in the sense that its security properties depend exponentially on both the manufacturing variation and the challenge-response space. Our Python simulation methods are open-source and available at https://github.com/Noeloikeau/networkm.