BoardPUF: Physical Unclonable Functions for printed circuit board authentication

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are cryptographic primitives that can be used to generate volatile secret keys for cryptographic operations and enable low-cost authentication of integrated circuits. Existing PUF designs mainly exploit variation effects on silicon and hence are not readily applicable for the authentication of printed circuit boards (PCBs). To tackle the above problem, in this paper, we propose a novel PUF device that is able to generate unique and stable IDs for individual PCB, namely BoardPUF. To be specific, we embed a number of capacitors in the internal layer of PCBs and utilize their variations for key generation. Then, by integrating a cryptographic primitive (e.g. hash function) into BoardPUF, we can effectively perform PCB authentication in a challenge-response manner. Our experimental results on fabricated boards demonstrate the efficacy of BoardPUF.