Analysis of Ring Oscillator PUFs on 60nm FPGAs

In hardware security and trusted computing it is often desired to uniquely and unambiguously identify a device among several others of the same brand. Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) take advantage of subtle variations in the devices’ production process to achieve this. A ring oscillator (RO) PUF exploits differing time delays of circuits to yield a unique response from each device. The implementation of RO PUFs on FPGAs has been widely discussed but most experiments have been conducted on Xilinx FPGAs. In this paper we are reporting statistical results from an analysis spanning 20 equivalent Altera FPGAs. The presented results include the PUF quality’s dependency on different parameters like RO length and placement on the FPGA. We identify the optimal RO length of 16 Logic Elements (LE) and show some specific placement cases for which the otherwise very good PUF quality decreases drastically.