Supply voltage variation impact on Anderson PUF quality

Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) is a promising technique to enhance the security of Integrated Circuits (ICs) by providing a challenge/response pairs (CRPs) set, generated from physical properties of the device in which it is embedded. Indeed PUFs exploit small random manufacturing process variations, mainly measuring delays, to extract responses, such that they are unique and unclonable. Since PUFs are not deterministic circuits until to their realization, the test for a PUF is a process which involves statistical evaluation of some features, such as uniformity and reliability. The former measures the bits biasing for PUFs responses. The latter is related to the PUFs robustness against external uncontrolled disturbances (e.g. voltage variations), which could affect responses stability. Therefore, in this paper, we demonstrate the impact of the voltage variation on the Anderson PUF, implemented on the Xilinx Spartan-3E family. In particular, through experimental results, we show that the supplied voltage value is able to dramatically change the quality of Anderson PUF responses.