Welcome to the PUF research page of the Secure Embedded Systems (SES) Lab at Virginia Tech. One of our main areas of research is Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). Our main focus is efficient design and application of PUFs. The challenges in designing a security primitive like PUF are multiple: achieving reliability of the PUF-generated signature, randomness of the signatures, resiliency to attacks, low power consumption, compact area and easy system-level integration. In the SES Lab, we are focusing on a comprehensive approach to address these challenges to build an efficient, practically usable PUF. We try to solve the PUF problems using transistor-level techniques as well as high level algorithmic/statistical techniques. We have collected on-chip variability data of nearly 200 state-of-the-art ICs, and built functional prototypes for PUF-based secure SW execution, enhanced entropy extraction methods for PUFs. Our research effort can be broadly classified into three categories.

• PUF Characterization
• PUF Enhancement
• PUF Application

For a detailed description of the individual projects, please visit our project page. If you are interested in learning more about what a PUF is, please look at the PUF background page.

On-chip Variability Dataset and Tools related to PUFs

As part of our research, we have collected on-chip variability data from a sizable population of FPGA chips. Moreover, we have built tools to analyze the performance of PUFs. We are making an effort to make them available online for the research community to use. If you are interested, please visit our artifacts page for more information.

Contributors

• Jeff Casarona
• Luke McHale
• Logan McDougall
• Vikash Gunreddy
• Michael Cantrell
• Michael Gora
• Sergey Morozov
• Abhranil Maiti
• Inyoung Kim
• Patrick Schaumont

This work is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF) grant no 0855095 and grant no 0964680.