Ferroelectric FET-based strong physical unclonable function: a low-power, high-reliable and reconfigurable solution for Internet-of-Things security

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-power, reconfigurable FeFET-based strong PUF that offers high reliability and security for IoT devices by leveraging FeFET cycle-to-cycle variations, with resistance to machine learning attacks.

Contribution

It presents the first FeFET-based strong PUF utilizing C2C variation, demonstrating high performance, reconfigurability, and robustness against attacks and environmental changes.

Findings

High uniformity and uniqueness achieved

Resistant to machine-learning attacks with XOR structure

Robust to voltage, temperature, and device size variations

Abstract

Hardware security has been a key concern in modern information technologies. Especially, as the number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices grows rapidly, to protect the device security with low-cost security primitives becomes essential, among which Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is a widely-used solution. In this paper, we propose the first FeFET-based strong PUF exploiting the cycle-to-cycle (C2C) variation of FeFETs as the entropy source. Based on the experimental measurements, the proposed PUF shows satisfying performance including high uniformity, uniqueness, reconfigurability and reliability. To resist machine-learning attack, XOR structure was introduced, and simulations show that our proposed PUF has similar resistance to existing attack models with traditional arbiter PUFs. Furthermore, our design is shown to be power-efficient, and highly robust to write voltage, temperature and device size, which makes it a competitive security solution for Internet-of-Things edge devices.