Memristor Crossbar PUF based Lightweight Hardware Security for IoT

Billions of IoT (Internet of Things) devices are being introduced to our everyday life each year. Most of them have little to no security features embedded in them. But these devices connect to internet and communicate with other devices all the time which pose a great security and privacy risk. Due to the resource constraint nature of these devices, initially security was not being considered as an essential feature. Therefore, any security features to be included in these devices should be minimal in area, energy consumption and added delay. Physical unclonable function (PUF) has emerged as a low-overhead solution for a variety of security concerns in recent years. In this paper, we have presented a simple security method for small IoT devices based on PUFs. The idea is to secure the backup data during sleep mode of an embedded processor or when power is unavailable for a batteryless system. With the emergence of nano-technology, memristors are being widely explored due to their non-volatility, low footprint among other advantages. Our proposed security system utilizes a memristor based PUF along with memristors as a non-volatile backup memory. The proposed system is very lightweight as this domain demands and provide reasonable security.