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.
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.