APUF Production Line Faults: Uniqueness and Testing

Abstract

Arbiter Physically Unclonable Functions (APUFs) are low-cost hardware security primitives that may serve as unique digital fingerprints for ICs. To fulfill this role, it is critical for manufacturers to ensure that a batch of PUFs coming off the same design and production line have different truth tables, and uniqueness / inter-PUF-distance metrics have been defined to measure this. This paper points out that a widely-used uniqueness metric fails to capture some special cases, which we remedy by proposing a modified uniqueness metric. We then look at two fundamental APUF-native production line fault models that severely affect uniqueness: the $\mu$ (abnormal mean of a delay difference element) and (abnormal variance of a delay difference element) faults. We propose test and diagnosis methods aimed at these two APUF production line faults, and show that these low-cost techniques can efficiently and effectively detect such faults, and pinpoint the element of abnormality, without the (costly) need to directly measure the uniqueness metric of a PUF batch.