Toward Physically Unclonable Functions From Plasmonics-Enhanced Silicon Disc Resonators

Abstract

The omnipresent digitalization trend has enabled a number of related malicious activities, ranging from data theft to disruption of businesses, counterfeiting of devices, and identity fraud, among others. Hence, it is essential to implement security schemes and to ensure the reliability and trustworthiness of electronic circuits. Toward this end, the concept of physically unclonable functions (PUFs) has been established at the beginning of the 21st century. However, most PUFs have eventually, at least partially, fallen short of their promises, which are unpredictability, unclonability, uniqueness, reproducibility, and tamper resilience. That is because most PUFs directly utilize the underlying microelectronics, but that intrinsic randomness can be limited and may thus be predicted, especially by machine learning. Optical PUFs, in contrast, are still considered as promising-they can derive strong, hard-to-predict randomness independently from microelectronics, by using some kind of "optical token." Here we propose a novel concept for plasmonics-enhanced optical PUFs, or peo-PUFs in short. For the first time, we leverage two highly nonlinear phenomena in conjunction by construction: (i) light propagation in a silicon disk resonator, and (ii) surface plasmons arising from nanoparticles arranged randomly on top of the resonator. We elaborate on the physical phenomena, provide simulation results, and conduct a security analysis of peo-PUFs for secure key generation and authentication. This study highlights the good potential of peo-PUFs, and our future work is to focus on fabrication and characterization of such PUFs.

Hardware Security For and Beyond CMOS Technology

“…This idea serves for labelling and authentication of chips (or other goods, for that matter). Loosely related, because without [182] 2.5D IP protection; SM Interposer [82] 2.5D Trojan prevention; SM Interposer [183] F2F IP protection; SM, camouflaging Parts of 3D IC [184] M3D IP protection; camouflaging Whole 3D IC [185] F2F IP protection, Trojan prevention; Only BEOL SM, camouflaging [186] TSV Probing protection; enclosure Whole 3D IC [187,188] TSV Side-channel mitigation; enclosure Whole 3D IC [4] 2.5D Runtime monitoring; separation Interposer the need for nanowires, the authors in [93] proposed the concept of plasmonics-enhanced optical PUFs and provide physical-simulation results and a security analysis.…”

“…Optical PUFs represent another interesting class [84,[89][90][91][92][93]. Here the idea is to manufacture an "optical token" which, in addition to structural variations inherently present in selected optical media, may contain randomly included materials, e.g., nanoparticles.…”

“…Here the idea is to manufacture an "optical token" which, in addition to structural variations inherently present in selected optical media, may contain randomly included materials, e.g., nanoparticles. Depending on the materials used for the token and the inclusions as well as the design of the token itself, these phenomena can be highly chaotic and nonlinear by nature [92,93]. Hence, optical PUFs are considered more powerful than electronic PUFs.…”

“…This idea serves for labelling and authentication of chips (or other goods, for that matter). Loosely related, because without the need for nanowires, the authors in [93] proposed the concept of plasmonics-enhanced optical PUFs and provide physical-simulation results and a security analysis.…”

Hybrid Plasmonic/Photonic Nanoscale Strategy for Multilevel Anticounterfeit Labels

“…31−44 They, indeed, intrinsically offer the possibility of a double signature: (i) the chromatic one, represented by the specific colorful response of the system, and (ii) its spectral response. 45,46 While the former is very easy to challenge by a quick visual investigation, the latter requires slightly more sophisticated approaches which often rely on the spectroscopic analysis of the label. The so-called plasmonic materials belong to this family.…”