PUF proteins specifically bind mRNAs to regulate their stability and translation. Here we focus on the RNA-binding specificity of a C. elegans PUF protein, PUF-11. Our findings reveal that PUF-11 binds RNA in multiple modes, in which the protein can accommodate variable spacings between two distinct recognition elements. We propose a structural model in which flexibility in the central region o...

We present a memristive device based RPUF construction achieving highly desired PUF properties, which are not offered by most current PUF designs: (1) High reliability, almost 100% that is crucial for PUF-based cryptographic key generations, significantly reducing, or even eliminating the expensive overhead of on-chip error correction logic and the associated helper on-chip data storage or off-...

mRNA control networks depend on recognition of specific RNA sequences. Pumilio-fem-3 mRNA binding factor (PUF) RNA-binding proteins achieve that specificity through variations on a conserved scaffold. Saccharomyces cerevisiae Puf3p achieves specificity through an additional binding pocket for a cytosine base upstream of the core RNA recognition site. Here we demonstrate that this chemically sim...

We propose a new technique called stable-PUF-marking as an alternative to error correction to get reproducible (i.e. stable) outputs from physical unclonable functions (PUF). The concept is based on the influence of the mismatch on the stability of the PUF-cells’ output. To use this fact, cells providing a high mismatch between their crucial transistors are selected to substantially lower the e...

The evaluation of Physically Unclonable Function (PUFs) quality is an open problem, as the PUF represents a circuit signature which depends on process variation but also environmental conditions. Some metrics consisting in analysing the statistics of PUF outputs have been introduced. The considered metrics are often the randomness (max entropy), the uniqueness (two PUFs should be different), an...

Rhodospirillum rubrum is a facultatively phototrophic bacterium that, under certain growth conditions, forms an intracytoplasmic chromatophore membrane (ICM) housing the photochemical apparatus. The puf operon of R. rubrum encodes protein subunits of the photochemical reaction center and the B880 light-harvesting antenna complex. Mutant strains of R. rubrum were constructed by interposon mutage...

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are promising hardware security primitives suitable for low-cost cryptographic applications. Ring oscillator (RO) PUF is a well-received silicon PUF solution due to its ease of implementation and entropy evaluation. However, the responses of RO-PUFs are susceptible to environmental changes, in particular, to temperature variations. Additionally, a convention...

Digital systems have numerous advantages over analog systems including robustness, resiliency against operational variations. However, one of the most popular hardware security primitive, PUF, has been an analog component. In this paper, we propose the concept of digital PUF where the core idea is to intentionally use high-risk synthesis to induce defects in circuits. Due to the effect of proce...

The regulation of gene expression is crucial in diverse areas of biological science, engineering, and medicine. A genetically encoded system based on the RNA binding domain of the Pumilio and FBF (PUF) proteins was developed for the bidirectional regulation (i.e., either upregulation or downregulation) of the translation of a target mRNA. PUF domains serve as designable scaffolds for the recogn...

The Bistable Ring (BR) Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is a newly proposed hardware security primitive in the PUF family. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate its resilience against Machine Learning (ML) modeling attacks. Based on the success of ML attacks, we propose XOR strategies to enhance the security of BR PUFs. Our results show that the XOR BR PUF with more than four parallel BR ...