Randomness in emerging technologies: Functional robustness vs. security

International audienceThe rapid development of low power, high density, high performance SoCs has pushed the CMOS devices to their limits and opened the field to the development of emerging technologies. The STT-MRAM and RRAM have emerged as promising choices for embedded memories due to their reduced read/write latency and high CMOS integration capability. Their inner properties make them ideal for implementation of memory blocks (mach and main memory) and, in addition, they are suitable for the implementation of basic security primitives such Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and True Random Number Generators (TRNGs). PUFs are emerging primitives used to implement low-cost device authentication and secure secret key generation. On the other hand, TRNGs generate random numbers from a physical process. This talk will present a survey of today’s and tomorrow’s technologies and explain how it is possible to exploit (i) the high variability affecting the electrical device characteristics to build a robust, unclonable and unpredictable PUF, and (ii) the stochastic characteristics to generate randomly distributed numbers. In addition, it will underline the conflict between functional robustness and security quality of ICs designed with such devices