Multi-valued arbiters for quality enhancement of PUF responses on FPGA implementation

Abstract

One main problem encountered in the FPGA implementation of Arbiter based Physical Unclonable Function (A-PUF) is the response instability caused by the metastability of delay flip-flop. This paper presents a new multi-arbiter approach to extract more entropy to extend the number of response bits to a single challenge. New multi-arbiter schemes based on the insertion of either a four-flip-flop arbiter or SR latch arbiter after each pair of multiplexers in the configurable paths are proposed to detect the metastable state when two copies of test pulse arrive at the arbiter inputs almost simultaneously. The detected metastable states are distinguishable by the encoded multiple valued outputs of the arbiter. The codes corresponding to the metastable states collectively form a deterministic ternary state that can be recoded to one of the stable states to improve the uniqueness and reliability of the PUF. Our analysis shows that the proposed design can generate robust and reliable challenge-response pairs with a uniqueness of 0.4982 and a reliability of 0.9985 at the expense of a relatively small FPGA resource overhead.