A Mini Review on—Physically Unclonable Functions: The Hardware Security Primitives

The Internet of Things (IoTs) is made up of several interconnected, resource-constrained devices, including sensors, actuators, and nodes that are connected to the Internet. These devices often have limited feature size/area and energy resources, making the cost of using traditional cryptography very expensive and infeasible. In recent years, physically unclonable functions (PUFs), a promising hardware security primitive, have emerged. In this paper, we discuss PUF as an alternative to these already available security protocols based on traditional mathematical cryptography. The PUFs are security primitives that address security issues such as IC authentication, Intellectual Property (IP) protection, etc. These PUFs are compatible with well-developed CMOS technology and are built on delay (such as; Arbiter, Loop, etc.) or memory structures (such as; RRAM, SRAM, etc.). IC Authentication Mechanism of PUFs and Types of PUFs have been discussed in brief in this paper. The potential of PUFs in different novel applications has also been discussed.