Laser Fault Injection on RO-Based PUFs Implemented on FPGA

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) offer an attractive alternative for cryptographic key generation by leveraging intrinsic manufacturing variations, thus eliminating the need for permanent key storage. Among them, RO-PUFs—based on ring oscillators—are widely studied due to their simplicity and efficiency. While the sensitivity of individual ROs to laser fault injection has been previously explored, this paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first experimental demonstration of a successful laser attack directly impacting the global output of an RO-PUF system implemented on an Artix-7 FPGA. We show that a localized laser injection can selectively alter the frequencies of targeted ROs, leading to deterministic changes in the PUF response. Our results reveal a significant physical vulnerability of RO-PUFs to this type of attack, highlighting the need to develop appropriate countermeasures.

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Published
2025-10-21
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/dft66274.2025.11257479
Primary Topic
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Type
article
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article

Laser Fault Injection on RO-Based PUFs Implemented on FPGA

Vincent Beroulle, Paolo Maistri, David Hély, Jean-Max Dutertre et al.
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
article

Laser Fault Injection on RO-Based PUFs Implemented on FPGA

Vincent Beroulle, Paolo Maistri, David Hély, Jean-Max Dutertre, Elena Ioana Vatajelu, Giorgio Di Natale, Aghiles Douadi
article en

Abstract

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) offer an attractive alternative for cryptographic key generation by leveraging intrinsic manufacturing variations, thus eliminating the need for permanent key storage. Among them, RO-PUFs—based on ring oscillators—are widely studied due to their simplicity and efficiency. While the sensitivity of individual ROs to laser fault injection has been previously explored, this paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first experimental demonstration of a successful laser attack directly impacting the global output of an RO-PUF system implemented on an Artix-7 FPGA. We show that a localized laser injection can selectively alter the frequencies of targeted ROs, leading to deterministic changes in the PUF response. Our results reveal a significant physical vulnerability of RO-PUFs to this type of attack, highlighting the need to develop appropriate countermeasures.

Institut polytechnique de Grenoble (FR), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR), Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives (FR), Mines Saint-Étienne (FR), Techniques of Informatics and Microelectronics for Integrated Systems Architecture (FR), Laboratoire de Conception et d'Intégration des Systèmes (FR), Laboratoire d'Électronique des Technologies de l'Information (FR), Université Grenoble Alpes (FR)
Openalex Percentile: Top 64%
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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Laser Fault Injection on RO-Based PUFs Implemented on FPGA — Vincent Beroulle, Paolo Maistri, et al. · (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS