Cross-PUF Attacks: Targeting FPGA Implementation of Arbiter-PUFs

The hardware primitives known as Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) generate unique signatures based on uncontrollable variations which occur during the manufacturing process of silicon chips. These signatures are in turn used for securing Integrated Circuits either as a secret key for cryptographic modules, or as a medium for authenticating devices. Naturally being a security primitive, PUFs are the target for attacks as such it is important to mitigate such vulnerabilities. This paper in particular investigates PUFs’ vulnerability to power-based modeling attacks. Here, we expand upon our previous simulation based Cross-PUF attacks by targeting PUFs realized in real-silicon; namely, we consider PUFs deployed in Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) fabrics. In Cross-PUF attacks, a model of a reference PUF is used to attack another PUF realized from the same HSPICE simulated design or the same bitstream in FPGA. We also investigate the impact of such attacks on multi-bit parallel PUFs. The HSPICE simulation results are compared vis-a-vis with the FPGA implementation outcome of these attacks confirming the effectiveness of such simulations. Finally we show that a combination of Dual Rail logic and Random Initialization logic, named DRILL, can be effectively used to thwart such power-based modeling attacks.