The article presents a model of an arbiter-based Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) using an artificial neural network (ANN) implemented on the NodeMCU ESP8266 for lightweight authentication in resource-constrained IoT applications like wireless sensor networks. The model achieves approximately 99.5% prediction accuracy and consumes around 309,889 bytes of memory space, offering a solution for implementing hardware-level security by leveraging unique hardware fingerprints. It suggests a secret computational model stored in the verifier’s database to reduce area consumption and avoid the need for extensive challenge-response pairs during authentication.