TI-PUF: Toward Side-Channel Resistant Physical Unclonable Functions

Abstract

One of the main motivations behind introducing PUFs was their ability to resist physical attacks. Among them, cloning was the major concern of related scientific literature. Several primitive PUF designs have been introduced to the community, and several machine learning attacks have been shown capable to model such constructions. Although a few works have expressed how to make use of Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) leakage of PUF constructions to significantly improve the modeling attacks, little attention has been payed to provide corresponding countermeasures. In this paper, we present a generic technique to operate any PUF primitive in an SCA-secure fashion. We, for the first time, make it possible to apply a provably-secure masking countermeasure – Threshold Implementation (TI) – on a strong PUF design. As a case study, we concentrate on the Interpose PUF, and based on practical experiments on an FPGA prototype, we demonstrate the ability of our construction to prevent the recovery of intermediate values through SCA measurements.