Maxim Integrated Products, Inc.
Systems and methods for stable physically unclonable functions

Abstract:

Systems and methods allow to take advantage of the natural statistical variation of physical properties in a semiconductor device in order to create truly random, repeatable, and hard to detect cryptographic bits. This may be accomplished by recursively pairing mismatch values of Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) elements so as to ensure that generated PUF key bits remain insensitive to environmental errors, without affecting the utilization rate of available PUF elements. The pairing process may be applied to any given hardware to generate more stable PUF bit sequences that provide a higher margin of error, increase the number of bits for a given margin of error, or any combination thereof.