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The Security Project

A Technique to Build a Secret Key in Integrated Circuits for Identification and Authentication Applications [abstract] (IEEE Xplore, PDF)
Jae W. Lee, Daihyun Lim, Blaise Gassend, G. Edward Suh, Marten van Dijk, and Srinivas Devadas
Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Symposium on VLSI Circuits (VLSI), June 2004.
Accept Rate: 32% (108/329).

This paper describes a technique that exploits the statistical delay variations of wires and transistors across ICs to build a secret key unique to each IC. To explore its feasibility, we fabricated a candidate circuit to generate a response based on its delay characteristics. We show that there exists enough delay variation across ICs implementing the proposed circuit to identify individual ICs. Further, the circuit functions reliably over a practical range of environmental variation such as temperature and voltage.