SQ-PUF: A Resistant PUF-Based Authentication Protocol against Machine-Learning Attack

Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) provide hardware to generate a unique challenge-response pattern for authentication and encryption purposes. An essential feature of these circuits is their unpredictability, meaning that an adversary cannot sufficiently predict future responses from previous observations. However, machine learning algorithms have been demonstrated to be a severe threat to PUFs since they are capable of accurately modeling their behavior. In this work, we analyze PUF security threats and propose a PUF-based authentication mechanism called SQ-PUF, which can provide good resistance to machine learning attacks. In order to make it harder to simulate or predict, we obfuscated the correlation between challenge-response pairs. Experimental results show that, unlike existing PUFs, even with a large data set, the SQ-PUF model cannot be successfully attacked with a maximum prediction accuracy of 53%, indicating that this model is unpredictable. In addition, the uniformity in this model remains almost the same as the ideal value in A-PUF.