Performance analysis of a memristive crossbar PUF design

Physical unclonable functions (PUF) provide a hardware specific unique signature or finger print for an integrated circuit that can be leveraged to mitigate several security vulnerabilities. A dense memristive crossbar PUF is described which utilizes variations in the write-time of memristors as the primary entropy source. For this work, the write-time varies according to six specific device parameters which can be directly measured from fabricated memristors and easily included in an accurate model for circuit simulation. The results presented show strong statistical performance for the proposed design in terms of entropy, uniqueness and uniformity. Furthermore, the nature of sneak path currents in the crossbar structure are leveraged to provide an exponential number of unique configurations for each response bit. Results also show that the proposed crossbar-based PUF provides improved power consumption and smaller area utilization when compared to CMOS-based and other nanoelectronic PUF circuits.