Author(s): Wang, K (Wang, Kun); Shi, JW (Shi, Jianwei); Lai, WX (Lai, Wenxuan); He, Q (He, Qiang); Xu, J (Xu, Jun); Ni, ZY (Ni, Zhenyi); Liu, XF (Liu, Xinfeng); Pi, XD (Pi, Xiaodong); Yang, DR (Yang, Deren)

Source: NATURE COMMUNICATIONS Volume: 15 Issue: 1  Article Number: 3203  DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-47479-y  Published Date: 2024 APR 13 

Abstract: Integrated circuit anti-counterfeiting based on optical physical unclonable functions (PUFs) plays a crucial role in guaranteeing secure identification and authentication for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. While considerable efforts have been devoted to exploring optical PUFs, two critical challenges remain: incompatibility with the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology and limited information entropy. Here, we demonstrate all-silicon multidimensionally-encoded optical PUFs fabricated by integrating silicon (Si) metasurface and erbium-doped Si quantum dots (Er-Si QDs) with a CMOS-compatible procedure. Five in-situ optical responses have been manifested within a single pixel, rendering an ultrahigh information entropy of 2.32 bits/pixel. The position-dependent optical responses originate from the position-dependent radiation field and Purcell effect. Our evaluation highlights their potential in IoT security through advanced metrics like bit uniformity, similarity, intra- and inter-Hamming distance, false-acceptance and rejection rates, and encoding capacity. We finally demonstrate the implementation of efficient lightweight mutual authentication protocols for IoT applications by using the all-Si multidimensionally-encoded optical PUFs.

The researchers introduce an all-silicon optical PUF that enhances IoT device security through CMOS-compatible fabrication, showcasing five unique optical responses per pixel for advanced authentication and high information entropy.

Accession Number: WOS:001203371100001

PubMed ID: 38615044

Author Identifiers:

Author Web of Science ResearcherID     ORCID Number

Wang, Kun       0009-0005-5110-0153

Ni, Zhenyi       0000-0002-8379-9182

Lai, Wenxuan       0009-0002-0652-7156

eISSN: 2041-1723