Generating an unique identifier for FPGA devices

Nowadays FPGAs have been used in a wide range of electronic devices in many types of industry, from simple switches and motor controllers to complex factories, medical apparatus or building automation and control systems, and not only in device prototyping. Besides the advantages of the increasing use of FPGA devices such as: time to market, cost reduction, reliability, programmability or high performance designs, security issues disadvantages also start to appear. During the manufacturing flow, the design passes through many processes of different manufacturers: IP Vendor, System Integrator and Manufacturer. During this time the design is exposed to hardware threats. Therefore FPGA designs need to be protected against hardware attacks. Digital circuits, like Ring Oscillators (ROs), which emphasize process variations, that appear during the physical execution of FPGA are a promising primitive for FPGA security. In this paper, we present and analyze the experimental results of an FPGA security technique, namely generating a unique identifier, based on a ROs security primitive.