Barrel Shifter Physical Unclonable Function Based Encryption

Abstract

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are designed to extract physical randomness from the underlying silicon. This randomness depends on the manufacturing process. It differs for each device. This enables chip-level authentication and key generation applications. We present an encryption protocol using PUFs as primary encryption/decryption functions. Each party has a PUF used for encryption and decryption. This PUF is constrained to be invertible and commutative. The focus of the paper is an evaluation of an invertible and commutative PUF based on a primitive shifting permutation network—a barrel shifter. Barrel shifter (BS) PUF captures the delay of different shift paths. This delay is entangled with message bits before they are sent across an insecure channel. BS-PUF is implemented using transmission gates for physical commutativity. Post-layout simulations of a common centroid layout 8-level barrel shifter in 0.13 μ m technology assess uniqueness, stability, randomness and commutativity properties. BS-PUFs pass all selected NIST statistical randomness tests. Stability similar to Ring Oscillator (RO) PUFs under environmental variation is shown. Logistic regression of 100,000 plaintext–ciphertext pairs (PCPs) fails to successfully model BS-PUF behavior.