It is well-known that authentication and anticounterfeiting play important roles in the fields of hardware security and information security. However, the commonly used PINs, magnetic stripe cards, radio-frequency identification (RFID) are usually fabricated by public/private digital tokens or reproducible deterministic process. Most of them suffer the risks of being copied, tampered or counterfeited unnoticedly. Even worse, with the rapid development of the manufacturing and information technology, it is becoming increasingly easier and faster to counterfeit product, clone identity token and crack passwords. Biometrics such as fingerprints and faces recognition have advantages over traditional authentication methods, despite the fear of losing biometric data which can be disasters. All of these bring a serious safety threat for the modern world and may lead to an enormous loss to many aspects of the society.

The physical unclonable function (PUF) is a unique physical entity that cannot be reproduced or predicted inherently even by the original producer due to the stochastic fabrication process \[1,2\]. It has received considerable attention and is believed to be an advanced technical solution for authentication, anticounterfeiting, cryptographic key generation and other security related applications \[3\]. Among all types of PUFs, photonic PUFs generate random speckle patterns when injected by light, which carry either graphical or spectral information as anti-counterfeiting tags for strong authentication . Better yet, photonic PUFs were proved to be stronger than electronic PUFs when facing machine learning based modeling attacks \[4\]. Recently, some schemes have been presented to demonstrate photonic PUF and the applications in authentication and anticounterfeiting \[5\], while the registration and enrollment took long time, the stability and other performances of the key and authentication system were not evaluated. In addition, many photonic PUFs reported usually output disordered speckles in microscale although some of them are made of nanomaterials.

In this paper, we would like to introduce the recent progress of the photonic PUFs and their applications in security fields. Then we will demonstrate our photonic PUFs based on nanoparticles embedded in PMMA, which can work in the temperature range of -30̊C-80̊C with hundreds of hours stability. They are used in high-speed, robust authentication systems with good repeatability. After that, we will present a new disordered metasurface PUF composed of chaotic nanonets, which produces disordered speckles in nanoscale. This kind of PUFs are prepared by lithography-free top-down method compatible with conventional CMOS processes and read out by common optical microscope technology, providing a simple way to integrate nanofingerprints with electronic chips and devices seamlessly. The metasurface PUF used for mutual authentication among person and devices in IoT will be discussed in the paper as well.

 

Acknowledgement: 

This work is supported by National Science Foundation of China (Funding No. 61875178) and Science Challenge Project (TZ2018003-3)

 

References:

\[1\] R.S. Pappu, B. Recht, J. Taylor, N. Gershenfeld, Science 297, 2026-2030 (2002)

\[2\] R.S. Pappu, Physical One-Way Functions, Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (2001) 

\[3\] R. Arppe-Tabbara , M. Tabbara , T. J. Sørensen , ACS Appl. Mater. Inter., 11(6): 6475-6482 (2019)

\[4\] Atakhodjaev, Iskandar, et al., 2018 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) (2018).

\[5\] N. Namekata, M. Ohya, J. Nishikawa, Shuichiro Inoue, CLEO: QELS_Fundamental Science (2018)


Recent Advances in Photonic Physical Unclonable Functions for Authentication and Anticounterfeiting

Division / Sponsors: 
Electronic & Photonic Packaging Division (EPPD)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/InterPACK/InterPACK2020/volume/84041

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