PCKGen: A Phase Change Memory based cryptographic key generator

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is widely known as an effective countermeasure to withstand non-invasive computational attacks as well as invasive tempering attacks on trusted computing systems. However, vast majority of the PUFs reported to-date are defined by static Challenge-Response Pairs (CRPs) with inferior security. In this paper, we propose a novel design of dynamically reconfigurable PUF based on Phase Change Memory (PCM) technology to yield refreshed cryptographic keys whenever the need arises to achieve enhanced security. A dedicated circuit framework is also introduced to reinforce the diversity of the CRP sets and improve the stability of the proposed PUF. Extensive simulation results show that our proposed work promises a clean delineation from the security bottlenecks faced by the state-of-the-art PUF designs.