Birds of the Same Feather Flock Together: A Dual-Mode Circuit Candidate for Strong PUF-TRNG Functionalities

Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and True Random Number Generators (TRNGs) are two highly useful hardware primitives to build up the root-of-trust for embedded devices in Internet-of-Things and Cyber-Physical System applications. These applications demand the primitives be lightweight, yet flexible. However, PUFs are designed to offer repetitive and instance-specific randomness, whereas TRNGs are expected to be invariably random. A challenging but thought-provoking problem from a hardware designer's perspective would be to design a circuit that serves the purpose of both PUF and TRNG depending on the exact requirement of the application. Here, we present a dual-mode PUF-TRNG design that utilises two different hardware-intrinsic properties, i.e. oscillatory metastability of Transition Effect Ring Oscillator (TERO) cell and propagation delay of a buffer within the cell to achieve this goal. A 48.62% reduction in area is accomplished due to the integration in comparison to separate instances of standalone PUFs/ TRNG designs, built from Programmable Delay Line (PDL) based Arbiter PUFs (APUFs) and TERO-TRNG. Our final design has a hardware footprint of 618 Look-Up Tables (LUTs) and 447 Flip-Flops (FFs). Furthermore, experimental analysis of the state-of-the-art modelling attacks, reliability attacks on the proposed PUF design shows a prediction accuracy of 55.37% and 50.14% respectively for 5.2M Challenge Response Pairs (CRPs). Additionally, the TRNG passes evaluation through National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-22 and German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) Application Notes and Interpretation of the Scheme (AIS)-31 tests.