Investigation of DRAM PUFs Reliability under Device Accelerated Aging Effects

Physical Unclonable Functions are promising candidates for lightweight authentication applications as they are hard to predict and clone. PUFs are dependent on process variations that occurs during silicon chip fabrication. As the CMOS technology scales down towards nanoscale dimensions, there are increasing transistor reliability challenges which impact the lifetime of integrated circuits. These issues are known as aging effects, which result in degradation of the performance of circuits. In this paper, we analyze the effects of aging on the reliability of intrinsic DRAM PUFs. We present accelerated aging experimental results over 18 months (from Sep. 2014 to Feb. 2016) on 3 DRAM PUFs. Based on our observations, DRAM PUFs maintain their reliability over time, and thus, validate the use of DRAM PUFs in a number of applications such as system authentications.