Visible to the public Strong PUF Security Metrics: Response Sensitivity to Small Challenge Perturbations

TitleStrong PUF Security Metrics: Response Sensitivity to Small Challenge Perturbations
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2022
AuthorsKappelhoff, Fynn, Rasche, Rasmus, Mukhopadhyay, Debdeep, Rührmair, Ulrich
Conference Name2022 23rd International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED)
KeywordsHardware, machine learning, Machine Learning Attacks on PUFs, Measurement, Metrics, Modeling Attacks on PUFs, Parametric statistics, Perturbation methods, pubcrawl, security metrics, Sensitivity, Strong PUF Attacks, Strong PUF Security, Strong PUFs, Training
AbstractThis paper belongs to a sequence of manuscripts that discuss generic and easy-to-apply security metrics for Strong PUFs. These metrics cannot and shall not fully replace in-depth machine learning (ML) studies in the security assessment of Strong PUF candidates. But they can complement the latter, serve in initial PUF complexity analyses, and are much easier and more efficient to apply: They do not require detailed knowledge of various ML methods, substantial computation times, or the availability of an internal parametric model of the studied PUF. Our metrics also can be standardized particularly easily. This avoids the sometimes inconclusive or contradictory findings of existing ML-based security test, which may result from the usage of different or non-optimized ML algorithms and hyperparameters, differing hardware resources, or varying numbers of challenge-response pairs in the training phase.This first manuscript within the abovementioned sequence treats one of the conceptually most straightforward security metrics on that path: It investigates the effects that small perturbations in the PUF-challenges have on the resulting PUF-responses. We first develop and implement several sub-metrics that realize this approach in practice. We then empirically show that these metrics have surprising predictive power, and compare our obtained test scores with the known real-world security of several popular Strong PUF designs. The latter include (XOR) Arbiter PUFs, Feed-Forward Arbiter PUFs, and (XOR) Bistable Ring PUFs. Along the way, our manuscript also suggests techniques for representing the results of our metrics graphically, and for interpreting them in a meaningful manner.
DOI10.1109/ISQED54688.2022.9806260
Citation Keykappelhoff_strong_2022