On Metrics to Quantify the Inter-Device Uniqueness of Physically Unclonable Functions

Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have been an emerging topic in hardware security and trust in recent years, and many different kinds of PUFs have been presented in the literature. An important criterion is always the diversity of PUF responses for different devices, called inter-device uniqueness. A very popular uniqueness metric consists of calculating the pairwise hamming distance between the response bitstrings of all devices, assuming that all response bits are uncorrelated. Such correlations, however, should be regarded when a statement about inter-device uniqueness is made. We therefore propose a novel correlation metric to fulfil this requirement. Furthermore, we show that the hamming distance metric is actually redundant when at the same time the also popular bit-aliasing metric is applied.