Bit Error Probability Evaluation of Ring Oscillator PUF (Short Paper)

Physically unclonable functions PUFs utilize the intrinsic process variation inside an integrated circuit to generate unique secret keys for cryptographic modules. PUFs can eliminate the risk that the keys stored in non-volatile memory is easy to be attacked by physical invasive attacks. Ring oscillator PUF RO PUF is popular for its nice property and easy implementation, and the frequencies of ROs are compared pairwise to generate one bit response. However, the frequency measurement is affected by environmental noise and the comparison of two frequencies may lead to bit error. To date, there is only a qualitative conclusion that high counting value is chosen to reduce noise's influence. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the relationship between the frequency measurement counting value and the bit error probability. On the observation of our experiments' data, we describe a comprehensive model to estimate the bit error probability of RO PUFs and present other factors to influence the bit error probability, such as the stages of ROs, the manufacturing techniques and so on. The results calculated from our model and those from measured data achieve high consistency. Our work contributes to the evaluation scheme for RO PUFs and it is available as a guide for people to design RO PUFs with an acceptable bit error rate.

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