Spintronic PUFs for Security, Trust, and Authentication

Abstract

We propose spintronic physically unclonable functions (PUFs) to exploit security-specific properties of domain wall memory (DWM) for security, trust, and authentication. We note that the nonlinear dynamics of domain walls (DWs) in the physical magnetic system is an untapped source of entropy that can be leveraged for hardware security. The spatial and temporal randomness in the physical system is employed in conjunction with microscopic and macroscopic properties such as stochastic DW motion, stochastic pinning/depinning, and serial access to realize novel relay-PUF and memory-PUF designs. The proposed PUFs show promising results (∼50% interdie Hamming distance (HD) and 10% to 20% intradie HD) in terms of randomness, stability, and resistance to attacks. We have investigated noninvasive attacks, such as machine learning and magnetic field attack, and have assessed the PUFs resilience.