Intrinsic Identification of Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA Devices Using Uninitialized Parts of Configuration Memory Space

SRAM based fingerprinting is a promising technique for unique identification of physical devices. This method uses deviations in power-up behaviour caused by the CMOS fabrication process to identify physical devices. In the case of SRAM-based hardware reconfigurable devices such as FPGAs the integrated SRAM cells are often initialized automatically at power-up, sweeping potential identification data. We present an approach to utilize unused parts of configuration memory space for device identification. Based on a total of over 160,000 measurements on eight Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs we show that the retrieved values have promising properties with respect to consistency on one device and variety between different devices.