STT-DPSA: Digital PUF-based secure authentication using STT-MRAM for the internet of things

Physical unclonable function (PUF), a hardware-efficient approach, has drawn a lot of attention in the security research community for exploiting the inevitable manufacturing variability of integrated circuits (IC) as the unique fingerprint of each IC. However, analog PUF is not robust and resistant to environmental conditions. In this paper, we propose a digital PUF-based secure authentication model using the emergent spin-transfer torque magnetic random-access memory (STT-MRAM) PUF (called STT-DPSA for short). STT-DPSA is an original secure identity authentication architecture for Internet of Things (IoT) devices to devise a computationally lightweight authentication architecture which is not susceptible to environmental conditions. Considering hardware security level or cell area, we alternatively build matrix multiplication or stochastic logic operation for our authentication model. To prove the feasibility of our model, the reliability of our PUF is validated via the working windows between temperature interval (-35 °C, 110 °C) and Vdd interval [0.95 V, 1.16 V] and STT-DPSA is implemented with parameters n = 32, i = o = 1024, k = 8, and l = 2 using FPGA design flow. Under this setting of parameters, an attacker needs to take time complexity O(2²⁵⁶) to compromise STT-DPSA. We also evaluate STT-DPSA using Synopsys design compiler with TSMC 0.18 um process.