Bionic Optical Physical Unclonable Functions for Authentication and Encryption
This addresses security issues in hardware authentication and encryption for connected systems, representing a novel approach rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackled the vulnerability of low-entropy silicon physical unclonable functions (PUFs) by introducing bionic optical PUFs inspired by biological architectures, fabricated using a simple, low-cost process, and demonstrated their randomness, uniqueness, and robustness for cryptographic applications like authentication and encryption.
Information security is of great importance for modern society with all things connected. Physical unclonable function (PUF) as a promising hardware primitive has been intensively studied for information security. However, the widely investigated silicon PUF with low entropy is vulnerable to various attacks. Herein, we introduce a concept of bionic optical PUFs inspired from unique biological architectures, and fabricate four types of bionic PUFs by molding the surface micro-nano structures of natural plant tissues with a simple, low-cost, green and environmentally friendly manufacturing process. The laser speckle responses of all bionic PUFs are statistically demonstrated to be random, unique, unpredictable and robust enough for cryptographic applications, indicating the broad applicability of bionic PUFs. On this ground, the feasibility of implementing bionic PUFs as cryptographic primitives in entity authentication and encrypted communication is experimentally validated, which shows its promising potential in the application of future information security.