Online Reliability Testing for PUF Key Derivation

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) measure manufacturing variations inside integrated circuits to derive internal secrets during run-time and avoid to store secrets permanently in non-volatile memory. PUF responses are noisy such that they require error correction to generate reliable cryptographic keys. To date, when needed one single key is reproduced in the field and always used, regardless of its reliability. In this work, we compute online reliability information for a reproduced key and perform multiple PUF readout and error correction steps in case of an unreliable result. This permits to choose the most reliable key among multiple derived key candidates with different corrected error patterns. We achieve the same average key error probability from less PUF response bits with this approach. Our proof of concept design for a popular reference scenario uses Differential Sequence Coding (DSC) and a Viterbi decoder with reliability output information. It requires 39% less PUF response bits and 16% less helper data bits than the regular approach without the option for multiple readouts.