TV-PUF: A Fast Lightweight Analog Physical Unclonable Function

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is the hardwarecounterpart of a one-way function. It is capable of addressinghardware security issues such as device authentication, secretkey generation for cryptographic protocols, producing seeds forRandom Number Generators and much more. In this paper, we propose a design of an aging resistant, lightweight and lowpoweranalog PUF which exploits the susceptibility of ThresholdVoltage (Vth) of MOSFETs to process variations. Analyses ofthis Threshold Voltage PUF (TV-PUF) show improvements inpower consumption, reliability and anti-aging properties overthe contemporary PUF designs. Improvements have also beenobserved in security parameters like uniformity, reliability anduniqueness for 64-bit key generation over the existing PUFschemes. At 1 GHz clock input for the sense amplifier, our designconsumes 0.18 µW/bit power with 50% uniqueness and 50%uniformity. Moreover, it has been seen that the performance ofthis PUF is independent of the technology node in which it isbeing used, i.e., it gives high performance in 45nm, 65nm and90nm technology nodes. Aging analysis of the TV-PUF showsthat the reliability of our PUF remains unaffected by aging ofthe device.