POSTER: Attack on Non-Linear Physical Unclonable Function

Abstract

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is a promising hardware security primitive with broad application prospect. However, the strong PUF with numerous Challenge and Response Pairs (CRPs), e.g. the arbiter PUF, is vulnerable to modeling attacks. There are two major kinds of countermeasures. One is restricting CRP access interface, such as controlled PUF and XOR arbiter PUF, which unfortunately has been broken with the help of side-channels. The other is using non-linear electronic characteristics to produce CRPs, such as the current mirror PUF and the voltage transfer PUF. They are only proved to be resistant to SVM based attack, while no more analysis is further explored so far. In this paper, we propose an attack method based on compound heuristic algorithms of evolution strategy, simulated annealing, and ant colony to efficiently attack these two non-linear PUFs. This paper reveals that current mirror and voltage transfer are still not able to help strong PUF resist attacks. Our experimental results show that the average CRP prediction accuracy is as high as 99%.