SaTC: STARSS: Hardware Authentication through High-Capacity PUF-Based Secret Key Generation and Lattice Coding

硬件身份验证是保证设计和安全设计这一新兴学科的关键需求之一。它关注的是在芯片生命周期的任何时间点可靠且廉价地确定集成电路(IC)的真实性和来源。物理不可克隆函数(PUF)作为身份验证的基本原语很有希望，因为它们可以在特定身份验证协议中充当内部生成的硬件信任根。PUF是利用IC制造中固有的随机性来生成随机输出串的伪随机函数。实现强PUF潜力的核心挑战是它们在使用机器学习(ML)方法进行建模攻击时的脆弱性。尽管过去十年致力于PUF，但仍然缺乏既可靠又具有ML弹性的强大的硅PUF。该项目开发了一种强大的PUF，它利用纳米级CMOS的物理原理来获得优于现有设计的安全特性。这种新型PUF利用比例晶体管的物理特性，即亚阈值操作和漏感应势垒降低，来实现连续的非线性。该项目还研究了基于新码和格子结构的有效算法技术，以增强生成的PUF输出的整体结构和稳健性，从而能够生成高容量的秘密密钥。本项目开发的强PUF具有非常大的输入输出空间，对许多潜在的安全应用具有不可估量的价值。

Hardware authentication is one of the critical needs in the emerging discipline of design for assurance and design for security. It is concerned with establishing the authenticity and provenance of Integrated Circuits (ICs) reliably and inexpensively at any point in a chip's life-time. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) have significant promise as basic primitives for authentication since they can serve as intrinsically-generated hardware roots-of-trust within specific authentication protocols. PUFs are pseudo-random functions that exploit the randomness inherent in the IC manufacturing to generate random output strings. The central challenge in realizing the potential of strong PUFs is their vulnerability to model-building attacks using machine learning (ML) methodologies. Despite the effort devoted to PUFs over the past decade, there is still a lack of a strong silicon PUF that is both reliable and ML-resilient. This project develops a strong PUF that exploits the physics of nanometer-scale CMOS to attain security properties that are superior to existing designs. This new PUF exploits the physics of scaled transistors, namely subthreshold operation and drain-induced barrier lowering, to realize continuous nonlinearity. The project also investigates effective algorithmic techniques, based on novel codes and lattice-constructions, to enhance the overall structure as well as the robustness of the resulting PUF output to enable high-capacity secret key generation. The strong PUFs developed in this project possess a very large input-output space, making them invaluable to many potential security applications.