InterPUF: Distributed Authentication via Physically Unclonable Functions and Multi-party Computation for Reconfigurable Interposers

2026-01-16

AI Summary

This work addresses the lack of a scalable, decentralized trust mechanism in reconfigurable interposers for multi-vendor heterogeneous chip integration. The authors propose a novel minimal-trust authentication model that embeds, for the first time, a routing-based differential-delay physical unclonable function (PUF) within the reconfigurable interposer. By integrating secure multi-party computation (MPC) with cryptographic hashing, the scheme enables collaborative verification while ensuring the original PUF response is never exposed. The approach eliminates the need for a centralized trust anchor and incurs negligible hardware overhead—only 0.23% area and 0.072% power increase—while achieving authentication latency in the tens of nanoseconds. Furthermore, the design demonstrates high uniqueness, reliability, and resilience against modeling attacks under variations in process, voltage, and temperature.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI

Abstract

Modern system-in-package (SiP) platforms increasingly adopt reconfigurable interposers to enable plug-and-play chiplet integration across heterogeneous multi-vendor ecosystems. However, this flexibility introduces severe trust challenges, as traditional authentication schemes fail to scale or adapt in decentralized, post-fabrication programmable environments. This paper presents InterPUF, a compact and scalable authentication framework that transforms the interposer into a distributed root of trust. InterPUF embeds a route-based differential delay physically unclonable function (PUF) across the reconfigurable interconnect and secures authentication using multi-party computation (MPC), ensuring raw PUF signatures are never exposed. Our hardware evaluation shows only 0.23% area and 0.072% power overhead across diverse chiplets while preserving authentication latency within tens of nanoseconds. Simulation results using pyPUF confirm strong uniqueness, reliability, and modeling resistance under process, voltage, and temperature variations. By combining interposer-resident PUF primitives with cryptographic hashing and collaborative verification, InterPUF enforces a minimal-trust authentication model without relying on a centralized anchor.

Problem

• reconfigurable interposers
• authentication
• trust
• system-in-package
• Physically Unclonable Functions

Innovation

• Physically Unclonable Function
• Multi-party Computation
• Reconfigurable Interposer
• Distributed Authentication
• Hardware Root of Trust