A Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is a hardware structure that enables unique identification of semiconductor devices.
Due to unique physical variations occurring naturally during semiconductor manufacturing, PUFs provide a digital fingerprint of the device, which
can be used to generate secure keys for cryptographic procedures, such as bitstream encryption and decryption for copy protection.
Cologne Chip has investigated this property on the GateMate FPGA under various conditions to ensure a stable and unique key generation using its built-in SRAM cells.
The encryption and decryption process can be combined with a wide variety of encryption mechanisms. Users can decide for themselves which method they want to use.
After a brief introduction to GateMate FPGA, we explain the difficulties caused by minimal improbabilities of PUFs and present the results of the investigation as well as an easy-to manage procedure for
encrypting and decrypting bitstreams for FPGAs