Memometer: Strong Puf-Based Passive Memory Hardware Metering Methodology For Integrated Circuits (Preprint)

As the semiconductor business has shifted towards a fabless model (horizontal business model); integrated circuit (IC) supplychain has become untrustworthy. ICs have altered the way we live, function, work, etc. To keep up with the demand, and foreconomic incentives, ICs are designed at one place and the fabrication happens at another place. This business model is beneficialfor the sake of revenue but involves compromised trust, since the fabrication contains all the design files necessary to overbuild,counterfeit, and clone ICs. Hence the identification and authentication of ICs has become an enormous concern for the governmentand commercial entities. In order to overcome these challenges, we present the Memometer: a low-cost, low-overhead system whichmaintains control and accountability of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), application specific integrated circuits (ASICs),and programmable logic devices (PLDs). The Memometer is based on passive hardware metering methodology that can uniquely tageach IC with an unclonable fingerprint. These fingerprints are further used in identification and authentication within the supplychain. The Memometer system uses uncommitted memory start-up values (SUVs) to create memory signatures and to identify andauthenticate any IC using these signatures. The Memometer uses the IEEE 1149.x Join Test Action Group (JTAG) port, readilyavailable on almost all ICs, to fingerprint ICs.