Performance Analysis of XOR-Inverter based Ring Oscillator PUF for Hardware Security

Ring Oscillator Physical Unclonable Function (ROPUF) has been the preferred choice for embedding hardware-oriented security and trust in FPGA based systems. Parameters such as uniformity, uniqueness, bit-aliasing, and reliability have been used to measure the performance of PUFs. In this paper, we present an XOR-Inverter based ROPUF which has improved uniformity, uniqueness, and bit-aliasing when compared with other designs. From the results, it is observed that the proposed 3 stage XOR-Inverter based design can produce Challenge Response Pairs (CRPs) with 47.64% uniqueness (50% ideal value), 49.8% uniformity (50% ideal value), and 50% bit-aliasing (50% ideal value) when compared to the best results from other similar ROPUF structures which yield uniqueness, uniformity, and bit-aliasing of 45%–47%, 50.53% and 47–50.5%, respectively. The reliability of our proposed PUF is better than most existing designs; however, it is fractionally less than that of the design presented in [6].