PUF based Smart Meter Security with Sx Chain

Abstract

A smart meter is resource-constrained device, therefore lightweight cryptographic methods are required. Physical unclonable function(PUF) is promising hardware based lightweight security solution, which makes use of the inherent process variation in semiconductor fabrication process to generate unique ID. This paper presents an PUF based smart meter security with frequency synthesizer(Sx) chain composed of VCO and dynamic divider(DDiv), which use oscillation frequency variation characteristics. In the Sx chain PUF implementation, the output bits are obtained by comparing the oscillation frequencies of different VCO inductor banks or dynamic dividers. For the lightweight operability, simple VCO or DDiv-PUF based authentication protocol is also proposed.