2019/07/11 by Alexander Schaub, Schaub, Alexander, Olivier Rioul +5
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1907.05494
openalex publication_date 2019/07/11 · openalex created_date 2022/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A physically unclonable function (PUF) is an electronic circuit that produces\nan intrinsic identifier in response to a challenge. These identifiers depend on\nuncontrollable variations of the manufacturing process, which make them hard to\npredict or to replicate. Various security protocols leverage on such intrinsic\nrandomness for authentification, cryptographic key generation,\nanti-counterfeiting, etc. Evaluating the entropy of PUFs (for all possible\nchallenges) allows one to assess the security properties of such protocols.\n In this paper, we estimate the probability distribution of certain kinds of\nPUFs composed of n delay elements. This is used to evaluate relevant R 'enyi\nentropies and determine how they increase with n. Such a problem was known to\nhave extremely high complexity (in the order of 22n) and previous entropy\nestimations were carried out up to n=7. Making the link with the theory of\nBoolean threshold functions, we leverage on the representation by Chow\nparameters to estimate probability distributions up to n=10. The resulting\nShannon entropy of the PUF is close to the max-entropy, which is asymptotically\nquadratic in n.\n