Robust optical physical unclonable function using disordered photonic integrated circuits

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Physical unclonable function (PUF) has emerged as a promising and important security primitive for use in modern systems and devices, due to their increasingly embedded, distributed, unsupervised, and physically exposed nature. However, optical PUFs based on speckle patterns, chaos, or ‘strong’ disorder are so far notoriously sensitive to probing and/or environmental variations. Here we report an optical PUF designed for robustness against fluctuations in optical angular/spatial alignment, polarization, and temperature. This is achieved using an integrated quasicrystal interferometer (QCI) which sensitively probes disorder while: (1) ensuring all modes are engineered to exhibit approximately the same confinement factor in the predominant thermo-optic medium (e. g. silicon), and (2) constraining the transverse spatial-mode and polarization degrees of freedom. This demonstration unveils a new means for amplifying and harnessing the effects of ‘weak’ disorder in photonics and is an important and enabling step toward new generations of optics-enabled hardware and information security devices.</jats:p>

Laser fabrication and evaluation of holographic intrinsic physical unclonable functions

“…In our approach, the PUF is generated by the random information from the disorder produced upon laser processing with the nanosecond pulsed laser while the meaningful information carried by the hologram acts as anchor points that relax the sensitivity to probing thus improving dramatically robustness. Therefore, our technique overcomes the severe limitations of present-day speckle-based optical PUF approaches that they are “notoriously sensitive to probing and environmental variations” 40 . We choose to model CGH both in beam Diffuser (BD) design and beam Splitter (BS) 31 (Fig.…”

Revisiting silk: a lens-free optical physical unclonable function

“…The obtained bit sequences for all silk ID cards are shown in Supplementary Fig. 16. The silk ID cards are prepared by gluing native silk in a holder (Supplementary Fig.…”

“…After the initial introduction of PUF concepts, various types of PUFs using optics [12][13][14][15][16] , magnetics [17][18][19][20][21][22][23] , electronics [24][25][26][27][28] , and radio frequency 29,30 have been reported. Compared to other PUFs, optical-based PUFs have the advantages of high entropy, high output complexity, and high security against modeling and cloning attacks 15 .…”

Multiplexed supercell metasurface design and optimization with tandem residual networks

“…Nanophotonic structures, including metasurfaces and metamaterials, have greatly expanded our ability to tailor light-matter interaction and deliver new functionalities for information processing and sensing applications [1], [2], [3], [4]. As demand for advanced capabilities and high-performance nanophotonic devices grow, multimodal implementations with interconnected ensembles of optical subcomponents, including in supercells, have shown great promise in delivering tailored responses with respect to many optical characteristics [5], [6], [7], [8].…”