CRISP: Platform-Agnostic Unified Reconfigurable Hardware Security Primitive

Atri Chatterjee, Sudipta Paria, Aritra Dasgupta, Habibur Rahaman, Baibhab Chatterjee, SWARUP BHUNIA
University of Florida


Abstract

Modern digital systems face diverse security threats, such as piracy, counterfeiting, and side-channel attacks, across different stages of the IC lifecycle. Addressing these threats individually increases design complexity, cost, and overhead, often forcing trade-offs against other critical design parameters. This paper presents CRISP, a unified, reconfigurable, and platform-agnostic infrastructure for hardware security primitives that consolidates three key features: (i) static entropy via a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF), (ii) dynamic entropy via a True Random Number Generator (TRNG), and (iii) secure access to scan-based Design-for-Test (DFT) into a single reconfigurable circuit-level fabric. CRISP integrates these security features within the augmented flip-flops, enabling distributed and flexible access to these primitives. The all-digital nature of CRISP primitives makes it amenable to automation and attractive for both ASIC and FPGA platforms. Experimental evaluation shows promising results with PUF achieving near-ideal inter-HD (49.45%) and Pearson Correlation Coefficient (-0.01) with Bit Error Rate (BER) less than or equal to 20%, while TRNG shows autocorrelation function (ACF) with 95% confidence and both pass all the NIST SP800-22 Randomness Tests. Fabricated on a 65nm test chip, CRISP demonstrates low area and power overheads of 0.071x10^6 F^2/bit and 11.82 fJ/bit, respectively, demonstrating its practical viability.