Hardware Security Primitives using Passive RRAM Crossbar Array: Novel TRNG and PUF Designs

TL;DR

This paper introduces novel hardware security primitives, specifically PUF and TRNG, implemented on RRAM crossbar arrays, demonstrating high reliability, uniqueness, and efficiency through extensive experiments and comparisons.

Contribution

The paper presents new TRNG and PUF designs on RRAM crossbars, leveraging device variations and sneak-path currents, with comprehensive evaluation and superior efficiency over existing methods.

Findings

TRNGs achieve pass rates in NIST tests.

PUF exhibits 100% reliability and high uniqueness.

Design outperforms existing solutions in efficiency.

Abstract

With rapid advancements in electronic gadgets, the security and privacy aspects of these devices are significant. For the design of secure systems, physical unclonable function (PUF) and true random number generator (TRNG) are critical hardware security primitives for security applications. This paper proposes novel implementations of PUF and TRNGs on the RRAM crossbar structure. Firstly, two techniques to implement the TRNG in the RRAM crossbar are presented based on write-back and 50% switching probability pulse. The randomness of the proposed TRNGs is evaluated using the NIST test suite. Next, an architecture to implement the PUF in the RRAM crossbar is presented. The initial entropy source for the PUF is used from TRNGs, and challenge-response pairs (CRPs) are collected. The proposed PUF exploits the device variations and sneak-path current to produce unique CRPs. We demonstrate, through extensive experiments, reliability of 100%, uniqueness of 47.78%, uniformity of 49.79%, and bit-aliasing of 48.57% without any post-processing techniques. Finally, the design is compared with the literature to evaluate its implementation efficiency, which is clearly found to be superior to the state-of-the-art.