ABSTRACT
This chapter considers security primitives based on memory cells. As memories continue to scale near the end of the complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor roadmap, they become increasingly sensitive to process variations and noise. A second benefit of memory-based primitives is that these primitives can be prototyped using commercial memory chips. Security primitives based on memory will often use memory as a basic information source, but the application of the primitive will require some additional circuitry around the memory to postprocess its data, or to stimulate the memory in a nonstandard way. One security primitive that can be based on memory cells is the physical unclonable functions (PUF). A second security primitive that can be based on memory cells is random number generation. Silicon PUFs are circuits that produce outputs according to the process variation of each chip instance. A vast majority of static random-access memory (SRAM) PUFs are based on fingerprints extracted from the power-up state of SRAM.
