Comparative Analysis of Delay-Based and Memory-Based Physical Unclonable Functions

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is a promising hardware security primitive that uses physical characteristics to provide a unique identifier for the device. PUFs are finding applications in device authentication, identification, secret key generation,key storage and also as random number generators. In this paper the main focus is to give a comparative analysis between the Delay-based and Memory-based PUFs. Several Delay-based and Memory-based PUF architectures have been proposed in the literature. The idea here is to compare these architectures in terms of performance metrics of PUF which include Uniqueness, Reliability and also in terms of conventional VLSI metrics which include area, power and delay. The results after comparison show that Memory-based PUF architectures give better performance in terms of uniqueness which is ≈ 50% (ideal 50%) but reduced reliability as compared to Delay-based PUF. Also, area overhead is less in Memory-based PUF as compared to Delay-based PUF as it avoids the need of adding extra circuitry.