Abstract

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are reconfigurable devices that are used in industries that often require increased security. Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are a security primitive used on FPGAs for device authentication and key generation. However, the output of a PUF can be susceptible to changes in the environment, such as voltage and temperature, as well as changes in device performance that occur due to transistor aging. Previous work has shown that it is possible to induce targeted accelerated aging in order to intentionally change a PUF response, even to the point of cloning one PUF to behave like another. In this work, we attempt to clone the response of a more challenging type of PUF, a configurable ring oscillator PUF (CRO PUF). By using targeted aging techniques, we are able to age specific CROs in an attempt to invert the outputs of CRO PUF configurations. Because there are multiple configurations that must be flipped between each CRO pair, we present an algorithm to determine what configurations will be aged at each phase of the process. Our experiment shows that our aging technique can age specific configurations; however, due to the inherent design of CRO PUFs, the technique is not capable of fully rewriting a PUF response. The results suggest that CRO PUFs are more resistant to these types of accelerated aging cloning attacks.

Degree

MS

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering; Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2025-04-22

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd13640

Keywords

FPGA, physical unclonable function, ring oscillators, config- urable ring oscillators, security, aging

Language

english

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Engineering Commons

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