Physical Unclonable Functions and Intellectual Property Protection Techniques

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Ramesh Karri, Ozgur Sinanoglu and Jeyavijayan Rajendran

On one hand, traditionally, secure systems rely on hardware to store the keys for cryptographic protocols. Such an approach is becoming increasingly insecure, due to hardware-intrinsic vulnerabilities. A physical unclonable function (PUF) is a security primitive that exploits inherent hardware properties to generate keys on the fly, instead of storing them. On the other hand, the integrated circuit (IC) design flow is globalized due to increase in design, fabrication, testing, and verification costs.