Digitally Mutating NV-FPGAs into Physically Clone-Resistant Units

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a practical method to create clone-resistant, self-mutating cipher modules in FPGAs, offering a low-cost, physically unclonable security alternative to traditional PUFs with scalable security levels.

Contribution

It introduces a novel SUC creation technique using FPGA bitstream manipulation and cipher templates, enabling physically clone-resistant units with post-quantum security potential.

Findings

Successfully prototyped in real FPGA hardware

Achieved scalable security levels, including post-quantum resilience

Demonstrated low hardware and software complexity for practical deployment

Abstract

The concept of Secret Unknown Ciphers (SUCs) was introduced a decade ago as a new visionary concept without devising practical real-world examples. The major contribution of this work is to show the feasibility of "self-mutating" unknown cipher-modules for physical security applications in a non-volatile FPGA environment. The mutated devices may then serve as clone-resistant physical units. The mutated unpredictable physical-digital modules represent consistent and low-cost physical identity alternatives to the traditional analog Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). PUFs were introduced two decades ago as unclonable analog physical identities which are relatively complex and suffer from operational inconsistencies. We present a novel and practical SUC-creation technique based on pre-compiled cipher-layout-templates in FPGAs. A devised bitstream-manipulator serves as "mutation generator" to randomly-manipulate the bitstream without violating the FPGA design rules. Two large cipher classes (class-size larger than $2^{1000}$) are proposed with optimally designed structure for a non-volatile FPGA fabric structure. The cipher-mutation process is just a simple random unknown-cipher-selection by consulting the FPGA's internal True Random Number Generator (TRNG). The security levels and qualities of the proposed ciphers are evaluated. The attained security levels are scalable and even adaptable to the post-quantum cryptography. The hardware and software complexities of the created SUCs are experimentally prototyped in a real field FPGA technology to show very promising results.