Memristor-based arbiter Physically Unclonable Function (APUF) with multiple response bits

Abstract

The memristor, short for memory resistor, is the fourth fundamental passive circuit element, whereby it can remember the resistance based on the last applied voltage. The memristor is used in the Physically Unclonable Function (PUF), which has potential for hardware security. To improve the performance of the memristor-based arbiter PUF, two modifications were made on the design, which are extracting multiple response bits from various stages in the delay paths in order to increase resistance against attacks, and using the SR latch rather than the D flip-flop as the arbiter because of better input-to-output path symmetry in the SR latch to minimize repsonse bias as well as circuit size and overhead. The proposed memristor-based APUF were simulated with two, three, and four memristors per stage. The memristor-based APUF performance were analyzed in terms of uniqueness, uniformity, and bit-aliasing, where the average values obtained were 49.32%, 53.21%, and 53.21%, respectively. The proposed memristor-based APUF performs well as expected.