Paper 2026/349

Multipath PA-PUFs generate all Boolean functions

, Indian Institute of Information Technology Vadodara, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing Bengaluru

Dibyendu Roy, Indian Institute of Information Technology Vadodara

Pantelimon Stanica, Naval Postgraduate School

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a generalized model of Priority Arbiter-based Physical Unclonable Function (PA-PUF) with an arbitrary number of paths inside each switch. We first develop a mathematical model for this generalized model. Experimentally, we observed that the class of Boolean functions generated from our model of PA-PUF increases proportionally with the number of paths inside each switch, and that motivated us to attempt one of the open challenges proposed by Kansal et al. [DAM 2024]. We first show that the set of Boolean functions generated from $i$-length PA-PUF with $(i+1)$ number of paths is a proper super set of the set of Boolean functions generated from $i$-length PA-PUF with $i$ number of paths. Based upon that, we show in our main result that we need at least $(n+1)$ numbers of paths inside each switch of an $n$-length PA-PUF to generate all the Boolean functions involving $n$-number of variables. Furthermore, we performed significant software and hardware experimentations to assess the resilience of our model against machine learning based modeling attacks.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/349,
      author = {R Radheshwar and Dibyendu Roy and Pantelimon Stanica},
      title = {Multipath {PA}-{PUFs} generate all Boolean functions},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/349},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/349}
}