On the effectiveness of the remanence decay side-channel to clone memory-based PUFs

Yossef Oren, Ahmad Reza Sadeghi, Christian Wachsmann

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

36 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present a side-channel attack based on remanence decay in volatile memory and show how it can be exploited effectively to launch a non-invasive cloning attack against SRAM PUFs - an important class of PUFs typically proposed as lightweight security primitive with low overhead by using the existing memory of the underlying device. We validate our approach against two SRAM PUF implementations in 65 nm CMOS ASICs. We discuss countermeasures against our attack and propose the constructive use of remanence decay to improve the cloning-resistance of SRAM PUFs. Moreover, as a further contribution of independent interest, we show how to use our evaluation results to significantly improve the performance of the recently proposed TARDIS scheme, which is based on remanence decay in SRAM and used as a time-keeping mechanism for low-power clock-less devices.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, CHES 2013 - 15th International Workshop, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages107-125
Number of pages19
ISBN (Print)9783642403484
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2013
Externally publishedYes
Event15th International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, CHES 2013 - Santa Barbara, CA, United States
Duration: 20 Aug 201323 Aug 2013

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume8086 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference15th International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, CHES 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySanta Barbara, CA
Period20/08/1323/08/13

Keywords

  • Data remanence decay
  • Fault injection attack
  • SRAM PUF
  • Side-channel analysis

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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