Biological One‐Way Functions for Secure Key Generation

Abstract

Disorder is fundamental to nature and natural phenomena, providing countless information sources, which are astronomically difficult to duplicate, but have yet to be exploited for cryptographic applications. While the contemporary crypto systems, relying on the premise of abstract mathematical one-way functions, are relatively difficult to decipher with reasonable and/or finite resources, the situation is bound to change with the advent of quantum computers, necessitating physically unclonable entropy sources. As such, inspiration is drawn from the disorder that is prevalent in nature and inherent to biological systems for designing disruptive mechanisms for cryptographic key generation. It is demonstrated that the spatiotemporal dynamics of an ensemble of living organisms such as T cells can be used for maximum entropy, high-density, and high-speed key generation. Further, such biology based one-way functions are oblivious to any mathematical representations and are computationally expensive to decipher even if an adversary has an exhaustive knowledge of the key generation mechanisms, which include cell type, cell density, key sampling rate, and sampling instance. The introduction of such biological one-way functions can greatly enhance the ability to protect information in the post quantum era.Digital information is experiencing an unprecedented and super-exponential growth across every sector of modern society including defense, automation, communication, computation, agriculture, healthcare, and infrastructure. Governments, military organizations, financial institutions, and corporations now withhold a large volume of confidential and classified information about their policies, employees, financial assets, customers, manufactured goods, and research and development data. Recent

Disordered Heteronanostructures of MoS2 and TiO2 for Unclonable Cryptographic Primitives

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A Machine Learning Attack Resilient True Random Number Generator Based on Stochastic Programming of Atomically Thin Transistors

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Robust optical physical unclonable function using disordered photonic integrated circuits

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