FPGA Intrinsic PUFs and Their Use for IP Protection

Counterfeiting of valuable goods in general and that of IP (embedded software) in particular leads to big revenue losses and is therefore a threat to the industry. In [31], Simpson and Schaumont proposed a fundamentally different approach to IP protection on FPGAs based on the use of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). Their work only assumes the existence of a PUF on the FPGAs without actually proposing a PUF construction. In this paper, we propose new protocols for the IP protection problem on FPGAs and provide the first construction of an intrinsic PUF based on SRAM memory randomness present on current FPGAs. We analyze SRAM-based PUF statistical properties and investigate the trade offs that can be made when implementing a fuzzy extractor.