PUF Enabled Trojan Trigger Prevention in IoE Edge Devices

The security of edge devices within the Internet of Everything (IoE) is crucial for establishing authentic and reliable communication links between parties. However, these devices are vulnerable to hardware Trojans, which can lead to service disruption, information leakage, and system compromise. This work presents a robust hardware security framework designed to prevent the activation of hardware Trojans, thereby ensuring maximum protection for edge devices. The proposed method leverages a Crossover Ring Oscillator Physical Unclonable Function (CRO-PUF) to obfuscate dynamically and de-obfuscate logic paths on FPGAs. In contrast to traditional static obfuscation techniques, such as the insertion of key gates or dummy logic, this dynamic approach tightly couples functional logic with real-time PUF responses. As a result, the hardware remains non-functional and unintelligible to attackers during untrusted stages such as manufacturing, testing, or reverse engineering. The proposed PUF generates 17,218 robust responses with a higher p-value of 0.99, resulting in a higher randomness index. The Trojan triggering probability is 9.99% for ISCAS benchmark circuits. Therefore, experimental evaluations using standard benchmark circuits demonstrate the effectiveness and resilience of the proposed approach in securing edge devices.