Techxplore.org April 7, 2021
A team of researchers in the US (Ohio State University, industry) created a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) based on an ultra-fast chaotic network known as a Hybrid Boolean Network (HBN) implemented on a field programmable gate array. PUFs take advantage of tiny manufacturing variations sometimes seen only at the atomic level and used them to create unique sequences of 0s and 1s that researchers in the field call “secrets”. Unlike the current PUFs, the new PUFs have 1077 secrets. They created a complex network in their PUFs using a web of randomly interconnected logic gates that creates unreliable behavior resulting in a type of deterministic chaos. The chaos amplifies the small manufacturing variations found on the chip which can change the entire class of possible outcomes. Key to the process is letting the chaos run just long enough on the chip, to avoid extreme chaos, and reproduce the pattern for authentication tasks. They calculated that it takes an inordinate amount of time to hack the system. The new PUFs could be used to create secure ID cards, to track goods in supply chains and as part of authentication applications…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Proposed HBN-PUF design… Credit: IEEE Access (2021).