A novel memristor-based hardware security primitive

Memristor is an exciting new addition to the repertoire of fundamental circuit elements. Alternatives tomany security protocols originally employing traditional mathematical cryptography involve novel hardware security primitives, such as Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). In this article, we propose a novel hybrid memristor-CMOS PUF circuit and demonstrate its suitability through extensive simulations of environmental and process variation effects. The proposed PUF circuit has substantially less hardware overhead than previously proposed memristor-based PUF circuits while being inherently resistant to machine learningbased modeling attacks because of challenge-dependent delays of the memristor stages. The proposed PUF can be conveniently used in many security applications and protocols based on hardware-intrinsic security.