In-depth Analysis and Enhancements of RO-PUFs with a Partial Reconfiguration Framework on Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC FPGAs

Abstract

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are excellent candidates to generate secret information on-chip without the need for secure storage. Ring-oscillator (RO) based PUFs have been receiving great attention over the years due to their easy design and superior statistical characteristics on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Although previous work has improved their statistical measures and provided deeper insights, there are still gaps to be filled. Therefore, this work presents an in-depth analysis of RO-PUFs on Xilinx Zynq-7000 FPGAs with a framework based on partial reconfiguration. This approach allows for full-chip characterization of 100% of the targeted area. Based on the measured data and beforehand estimated routing delay, we will show how to identify and avoid potential bias in the final PUF placement. By utilizing DSP48 slices, an enhanced counter was designed for high-frequency measurements. A second feedback path was added to the ring-oscillators in order to avoid glitches at the counters input. In combination with a reference normalization, the frequency standard deviation could be reduced to 0.0229% at a much shorter evaluation time of 10μs compared to the state-of-the-art, while maintaining the maximum inter-hamming distance. An investigation on the influence of spatial distribution on different RO pairings was performed. The chip variations were found to have a much larger effect on the statistical measures than the difference between logic elements. The measurement data and the framework will be made accessible to interested researchers to provide them with a data basis for further research.