TRGP: A Low-Cost Re-Configurable TRNG-PUF Architecture for IoT

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have made their presence felt across the domain, society, and individuals. These technologies have played a prominent role in shaping the digital world. However, they bring their own set of security and privacy threats. These devices being resource-constraint, are unable to mitigate the challenges with the existing traditional solutions. Various software and hardware solutions have been tuned for IoT security. Physical unclonable function (PUF) and random number generator (RNG) are the most useful for building security applications, especially in the resource restrained devices like IoT. The security protocols, including identification, authentication, and key-agreement, can be developed using PUFs, while RNGs can produce ephemeral keys and nonces. TRNG and PUF as a reconfigurable circuit, reduce the hardware cost and prove to be an effective solution. A memristor being the fundamental circuit element offers certain unique advantages, including the possibility of hybridization with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) circuits. This paper proposes a low-cost re-configurable TRNG-PUF named (TRGP), which can harness the benefits of both the TRNG and PUF. We evaluate their performance against various parameters and compare them with some of the exiting PUF and TRNG architectures.