Buskeeper PUFs, a promising alternative to D Flip-Flop PUFs

Cloning, theft of service and tampering have become serious threats on the revenue and reputation of hardware vendors. To protect their products against these attacks hardware security, based on cryptographic primitives using keys, can be used. These keys are usually stored somewhere in the hardware, so the strength of the security depends on the effort required from attackers to compromise them. Tools for attacking hardware have become very advanced, which has decreased the protection provided by storing a key in memory to a minimum. To protect devices against attacks on their keys, Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) can be used. PUFs are primitives that extract secrets from physical characteristics of integrated circuits (ICs) and can be used, amongst others, for secure key storage. This paper introduces a new type of PUF, the Buskeeper. In our study this new type of PUF is evaluated on the properties of reliability and uniqueness. For this purpose several tests have been performed in order to compare the results of Buskeeper PUFs to those of D Flip-Flop (DFF) PUFs from [4] and [14]. This comparison shows that the Buskeeper PUF performs as well as, if not better than, this (already known and generally accepted) PUF type. Since Buskeepers are much more efficient than DFFs in regard to the amount of hardware resources required, we conclude that the Buskeeper PUF is a viable (and probably preferable) alternative to DFF PUFs.