Reliable and Lightweight PUF-based Key Generation using Various Index Voting Architecture

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) can be utilized for secret key generation in security applications. Since the inherent randomness of PUF can degrade its reliability, most of the existing PUF architectures have designed post-processing logic to enhance the reliability such as an error correction function for guaranteeing reliability. However, the structures incur high cost in terms of implementation area and power consumption. This paper introduces a Various Index Voting Architecture (VIVA) that can enhance the reliability with a low overhead compared to the conventional schemes. The proposed architecture is based on an index-based scheme with simple computation logic units and iterative operations to generate multiple indices for the accuracy of key generation. Our evaluation results show that the proposed architecture reduces the hardware implementation overhead by 2 to more than 5 times, without losing a key generation failure probability compared to conventional approaches.