Disentangling The “Quantum PUF”: A Multi-Axis Taxonomy of Quantum Lineage, Classical Substrate Hardening, And Attacker Sophistication
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37547/tajet/Volume08Issue03-14Keywords:
Physical unclonable functions, machine learning attacks, hardware securityAbstract
Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) convert microscopic manufacturing noise inside a chip into a device-specific hardware fingerprint, but delay-based designs fall to machine-learning modelling once an adversary collects enough challenge-response pairs (CRPs). This article reports an empirical study of six machine-learning attacks — logistic regression, least-squares regression, a multilayer perceptron, an LMN feature-lifting model, a denoising autoencoder, and a compact Transformer encoder — against Arbiter OR-AND-XOR PUFs (AOX-PUFs), simulated with pypuf on the University of Sheffield's Stanage high-performance computing cluster across CRP budgets from 2,500 to 1.9 million. The attacks exploit the Arbiter PUF's linear-additive delay model, and the defence under test is a BB84-inspired encoding wrapper motivated by the Quantum Lock forging-probability bound. Classical AOX-PUFs were modelled with 95–99% accuracy within tens of thousands of CRPs, while BB84-inspired encoding capped every attacker at a flat ceiling of roughly 0.85–0.90 that did not rise within either batch, even at close to two million CRPs. Decomposing the encoding pipeline shows that this ceiling tracks the simulated measurement-success probability rather than a genuine basis-secrecy effect: disclosing the encoding basis altered outcomes by less than a percentage point. An illustrative calculation based on the Quantum Lock bound shows that a genuine quantum advantage should decay the forging probability exponentially as the number of encoded output qubits grows, a prediction the flat empirical ceiling does not fulfil. The results corroborate prior architectural-hardening findings for AOX-PUFs while diverging from the CRP-inflation behaviour the Quantum Lock model predicts.
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