Online Reliability Evaluation Design: Select Reliable CRPs for Arbiter PUF and Its Variants

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is a hardware security primitive with broad application prospects. Variants of the arbiter PUF have been proposed to resist modeling attacks. However, their low reliability issue limits their applications. To solve the low reliability issue, this paper proposes an Online Reliability Evaluation (ORE) design for the arbiter PUF and its variants. Moreover, a corresponding machine learning method to select reliable Challenge Response Pairs (CRPs) for applications is proposed. Based on the ORE design, a small number of CRPs and their reliability levels are collected during the enrollment phase. Then they are trained to build reliability models for predicting the responses and reliability levels of other challenges. Since the ORE design does not change the security structures of the arbiter PUF and its variants, the resistance to modeling attacks of PUF designs equipped with it is maintained. Compared to the previous work that tests 100,000 times per CRP, our design is time-saving in the enrollment phase since each CRP is only tested three times for training reliability models. The proposed design is implemented under the 40nm process. Experimental results on real chips show that all the CRPs selected by our reliability models are indeed reliable for applications, verifying the effectiveness of our method.