Assistant Professor Dr. (Anas Latif Mahmoud) chaired the master’s discussion for the student (Hussein Dhu al-Fiqar Jamil) from the Department of Computer Engineering / College of Engineering / University of Nahrain on Tuesday 2/18/2025 for his thesis entitled:

“Memristive-Based Physical Unclonable Function Design of Authentication Architectures”

This study shows the functionality (PUFs) allow physical devices to act as unclonable security assessments, as the PUF is resistant to hardware flaw attacks and acts as a fingerprint of electronic devices. A typical type of PUF circuit that uses delay is the ring oscillator PUF (ROPUF), Which provides the ability to adapt to continuous changes in obtaining non-repeating and unique secret key outputs by exploiting the advantage of the frequency differences characteristics between the ring oscillators in the circuit. This study discusses a structure that uses electronic components with nanotechnology. It is a memristor device, specifically the Ag/MoS₂/ZnO/Ti memristor. The use of the memristor included a simulation part that approximates the theoretical mechanism of the device using MATLAB to extract the hysteresis loop of the memristor model, which is considered as the signature of the memristor behavior.

After converting the voltage/current values ​​from analog to digital, these values ​​will be included as an input (challenge) to the ROPUF circuit. Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platforms are adopted to implement the memristive-PUF security architecture, which includes memristor-based ring oscillators to extract a non-reversible secret key that meets all security criteria.

Furthermore, this study investigates the improvement in performance metrics such as uniqueness, uniformity, bit distortion, and reliability, which are achieved in the following percentages, respectively. For different FPGA devices, such as Spartan-3, the resulting metrics were achieved as: 48.55%, 49.17%, 47.54%, and 98.22%. For Spartan-6, the results were extracted as 48.78%, 48.11%, 48.87%, and 99.13%. The results for Altera Cyclone II were 47.34%, 47.59%, 46.91%, and 97.42%.