In-DRAM Signature Generation Using Simultaneous Multiple-Row Activation: An Experimental Study of Off-The-Shelf DRAM Chips

2026-06-13

AI Summary

This work proposes a physical unclonable function based on Simultaneous Multi-Row Activation of DRAM (SiMRA-PUF), which generates highly unique and reproducible device fingerprints without requiring any hardware modifications to commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) DDR4 chips. Experimental evaluation across 112 modern DDR4 devices demonstrates that, under activation configurations ranging from 2 to 32 rows, the intra-device Jaccard similarity ranges from 89.02% to 94.86%, while inter-device similarity remains low at 2.37%–3.98%. Notably, the 2-row activation configuration achieves a 5.75% improvement in evaluation speed over existing DRAM PUFs. This study presents the first practical DRAM-based PUF that simultaneously offers low latency, high reliability, and compatibility with unmodified commodity hardware, making it well-suited for real-world security applications.

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate that it is possible to generate unique, repeatable, and device-specific signatures suitable for use as Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) responses in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) DRAM chips by leveraging simultaneous multiple-row activation (SiMRA). Based on a rigorous experimental characterization of 112 modern DDR4 DRAM chips (from 10 modules), we introduce SiMRA-PUF, the first DRAM-based PUF that uses SiMRA-generated signatures as PUF responses. We analyze SiMRA-PUF in terms of reliability, uniqueness, and evaluation latency for varying numbers of simultaneously activated DRAM rows (i.e., 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32), DRAM chip density & die revision, and evaluate how temperature affects the similarity of SiMRA-generated responses. Among our 8 key experimental observations, we highlight two major results. First, SiMRA-PUF provides average intra-Jaccard indices of 89.02%, 89.81%, 93.03%, 94.06%, and 94.86%, and average inter-Jaccard indices of 3.98%, 2.37%, 3.44%, 2.92%, and 3.24% for 2-, 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-row activations, respectively, showing that SiMRA-generated signatures are both repeatable within a device and unique across devices. Second, 2-row activation-based SiMRA-PUF provides 5.75% lower evaluation latency than the state-of-the-art DRAM-based PUF. We open-source our infrastructure and datasets at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/SiMRA-PUF.

Problem

• Physical Unclonable Function
• DRAM
• device-specific signature
• SiMRA
• COTS

Innovation

• SiMRA
• DRAM-based PUF
• Physical Unclonable Function
• simultaneous multiple-row activation
• hardware security