Electrical engineering

Cryptography

Resistive random-access memory

Financial economics

Operating system

Memristor

Engineering

Voltage

Embedded system

Economics

Electronic engineering

Arbiter

Reset (finance)

Overhead (engineering)

Hardware security module

Computer science

Bottleneck

Physical unclonable function

Computer hardware

Computer security

Field-programmable gate array

Internet of Things

Science Advances

A physically unclonable function (PUF) is a creditable and lightweight solution to the mistrust in billions of Internet of Things devices. Because of this remarkable importance, PUF need to be immune to multifarious attack means. Making the PUF concealable is considered an effective countermeasure but it is not feasible for existing PUF designs. The bottleneck is finding a reproducible randomness source that supports repeatable concealment and accurate recovery of the PUF data. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a concealable PUF at the chip level with an integrated memristor array and peripherals. The correlated filamentary switching characteristic of the hafnium oxide (HfOx)-based memristor is used to achieve PUF concealment/recovery with SET/RESET operations efficiently. PUF recovery with a zero-bit error rate and remarkable attack resistance are achieved simultaneously with negligible circuit overhead. This concealable PUF provides a promising opportunity to build memristive hardware systems with effective security in the near future.

Concealable physically unclonable function chip with a memristor array