A novel way to authenticate untrusted Integrated Circuits

Counterfeit Integrated Circuits (IC) can be very harmful to the security and reliability of critical applications. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) have been proposed as a mechanism for uniquely identifying ICs and thus reducing the prevalence of counterfeits. However, maintaining large databases of PUF challenge response pairs and dealing with PUF errors makes it difficult to use PUFs reliably. This paper presents an innovative approach to authenticate PUF challenge response pairs on IC chips. The proposed method can tolerate considerable bit errors from responses of PUFs without the use of error correcting codes. It is successful in authenticating 99.96% authorized chips and filtering out 99.92% cloned chips. The overhead is reduced by 65.62% compared to that of other authenticating solutions.