A write-time based memristive PUF for hardware security applications

Hardware security has emerged as an important field of study aimed at mitigating issues such as piracy, counterfeiting, and side channel attacks. One popular solution for such hardware security attacks are physical unclonable functions (PUF) which provide a hardware specific unique signature or identification. The uniqueness of a PUF depends on intrinsic process variations within individual integrated circuits. As process variations become more prevalent due to technology scaling into the nanometer regime, novel nanoelectronic technologies such as memristors become viable options for improved security in emerging integrated circuits. In this paper, we describe a novel memristive PUF (M-PUF) architecture that utilizes variations in the write-time of a memristor as an entropy source. The results presented show strong statistical performance for the M-PUF in terms of uniqueness, uniformity, and bit-aliasing. Additionally, nanoscale M-PUFs are shown to exhibit reduced area utilization as compared to CMOS counterparts.