Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are effective for security applications because they generate unique signatures that are resistant to cloning attempts as well as physical tampering. A Silicon PUF is a special circuit embedded in an IC that relies on random fabrication process variations to produce a unique signature for its native IC. We have investigated several different approaches for designing better PUFs including use of optimal proximity correction as well as circuit level techniques. New non-volatile devices, such as memristors, spin-transfer-torque (STT) RAM and ferroelectric RAM have attracted significant attention in recent years. Among these, memristors have garnered substantial interest due to their non-volatility and potential for building memories, approximate computation architectures and hardware security primitives. Recently, memristor crossbar based PUFs have been investigated by various researchers. We have developed an optimization theoretic attack scheme for memristor based PUFs which minimizes the effort necessary for learning the PUF characteristics.

• Yuntao Liu, Yang Xie, Chongxi Bao and Ankur Srivastava. “An Optimization-Theoretic Approach for Attacking Physical Unclonable Functions”. Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, 2016.

• Domenic Forte and Ankur Srivastava, “Improving the Quality of Delay-based PUFs via Optical Proximity Correction”, IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design (TCAD), Vol. 32, No. 12, December2013

• Domenic Forte, Ankur Srivastava, “Manipulating Manufacturing Variations for Better Silicon-Based Physically Unclonable Functions”, IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI), August 2012.

• Domenic Forte , Ankur Srivastava, “On Improving the Uniqueness of Silicon-Based Physically Unclonable Functions Via Optical Proximity Correction”, Design Automation Conference (DAC), June 2012.