Temperature-Resilient Reconfigurable PUF with Dual-Pulse Modulation based on SOT-MRAM Chip

2025-08-22

AI Summary

Existing reconfigurable physical unclonable functions (rPUFs) struggle to achieve environment-independent, real-time key regeneration across wide temperature ranges—critical for IoT endpoint security. This work proposes a novel rPUF architecture based on spin-orbit torque magnetic random-access memory (SOT-MRAM) devices, featuring an innovative dual-pulse control scheme that enables stable operation from −40 °C to 125 °C—without requiring real-time temperature sensing. Leveraging intrinsic process variations in SOT-MRAM, the design generates high-entropy, device-unique keys while preserving dynamic reconfigurability. The dual-pulse mechanism effectively suppresses temperature-induced magnetization switching drift, ensuring consistent key reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate a key reconstruction reliability of 99.3%, near-ideal randomness (NIST test pass rate >99.8%), and sub-10 ns latency—significantly outperforming state-of-the-art rPUFs.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, hardware-based security solutions have become an emerging choice for enhancing end-terminal information security. As one of the hardware technologies, physical unclonable functions (PUFs) utilize the inherent variations in the manufacturing process to generate cryptographic keys. Reconfigurable PUFs (rPUFs), characterized by updating cryptographic keys, offer enhanced security ability for protecting massive amounts of data in dynamic operational scenarios. The core challenge lies in achieving real-time reconfiguration independent of environmental conditions, particularly operating temperature, which has rarely been investigated and addressed. In this study, we propose a dual-pulse reconfiguration strategy based on SOT-MRAM carriers, which effectively widens the operating window and exhibits excellent PUF metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that our design achieves real-time reconfiguration across industrial-grade operating temperature ranges, without the need for dynamic feedback of real-time temperature. The proposed SOT-MRAM rPUF design lays a solid foundation for next-generation IoT protection architectures.

Problem

• Achieving temperature-independent real-time reconfiguration for PUFs
• Enhancing security in dynamic IoT operational scenarios
• Overcoming environmental dependency in cryptographic key generation

Innovation

• Dual-pulse reconfiguration strategy using SOT-MRAM
• Temperature-resilient operation without real-time feedback
• Widened operating window with excellent PUF metrics