Shaza Zeitouni, Yossef Oren, Christian Wachsmann, Patrick Koeberl, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi:
The Remanence Decay Side-Channel: The PUF Case
Abstract: We present a side-channel attack
based on remanence decay in volatile memory and
show how it can be exploited effectively to launch
a non-invasive cloning attack against SRAM PUFs
— an important class of PUFs typically proposed
as lightweight security primitives which use existing
memory on the underlying device. We validate
our approach using SRAM PUFs instantiated
on two 65nm CMOS devices. We discuss countermeasures
against our attack and propose the
constructive use of remanence decay to improve
the cloning-resistance of SRAM PUFs.
Moreover, as a further contribution of independent
interest, we show how to use our evaluation
results to significantly improve the performance of
the recently proposed TARDIS scheme, which is
based on remanence decay in SRAM memory and
used as a time-keeping mechanism for low-power
clockless devices.
