IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2021 - 6

to effectiveness in recovering secret information [14].
SCA analyzes the side-channel signals of integrated circuit
like power consumption, timing, and electromagnetic
information, etc. to recover the secret information
[15]-[16]. Among the various SCA attacks demonstrated,
differential power analysis (DPA), electromagnetic, and
photonic attacks have proved to be simple and successful
in recovering the secret key information of cryptographic
engines [17].
In the past decade, several methods/primitives have
been proposed to counter the hardware security attacks
such as designing physically unclonable functions
(PUFs), true random number generators (TRNG), sidechannel
countermeasures, and hardware obfuscation
[18]-[20]. These primitives and methodologies have
been adopted in divergent applications to enhance the
overall security of systems as shown in Fig. 2. PUFs are
secure one-way functions that produce unique output
to a given input by exploiting inherent physical variations
from the manufacturing process [21]. Thus, the
PUF circuits manufactured from identical
fabrication
processes generate different challenge-response pairs.
Due to this, PUFs are unclonable and robust against reverse
engineering attacks. To counter several security
issues, PUF has emerged as a secure key generator and
leveraged for divergent applications including E-health,
Wi-Fi authentication protocols, encryption protocols
for security, a key establishment for patient monitoring,
authentication for IoT communication, etc [22]-[23]. On
the other hand, TRNG produces random session keys
with high entropy by exploiting the device innate noise
characteristics that are inherently random [24]. Apart
from the higher throughput and lightweight benefits, the
output of pseudo random number generators is deterministic
in nature for an extremely long sequence [25].
TRNG has been explored as an important component in
secure electronic applications such as data encryptiondecryption,
secure wireless communications, and information
security, etc. Recently, a unified PUF and TRNG
concept has been demonstrated for applications like
the privacy-preserving mutual authentication (PPMA)
scheme that requires the simultaneous presence of
both primitives at IoT edge devices [26]. Therefore,
TRNG and PUF designs play a major role in several applications
to enhance hardware security. Several CMOS
based TRNG and PUF designs have been demonstrated
exploiting inherent sources of randomness like thermal
noise, oscillator jitter, metastability, and bias generation
[27]-[30]. Although CMOS based circuits are promising
for general-purpose digital, analog, and mixed-signal applications,
they offer limited security specific properties
for designing PUF and TRNG. Due to this, CMOS based
TRNG and PUF designs require large area overhead with
higher energy consumption.
The idea of SCA countermeasure is to break the relation
between secret information stored and side-channel
Hardware Security
Primitive/Methodology
E-Health
PUF
WiFi Protocols
Patient Monitoring
Encryption
Encryption-Decryption
Hardware
Security
TRNG
Information Security
Wireless
Communications
Secure
SCA
Countermeasures
Cryptographic Co-Processor
Secure Microprocessor
Figure 2. Divergent hardware security applications.
6
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
THIRD QUARTER 2021
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2021

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