Silicon photonic physical unclonable function.

Area of Science:

• Optics and Photonics
• Materials Science
• Information Security

Background:

• Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are crucial for hardware security, providing unique, unclonable identifiers.
• Existing PUF technologies face challenges in achieving high security and reliable key extraction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To demonstrate a novel photonic PUF based on nonlinear optical interactions.
• To leverage chaotic silicon micro-cavities for generating unique hardware fingerprints.
• To assess the security and reliability of photonic PUFs for information security applications.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of chaotic silicon micro-cavities.
• Probing the micro-cavities with spectrally-encoded ultrashort optical pulses.
• Utilizing ultrafast nonlinear optical interactions to generate unique responses.
• Extracting and analyzing binary keys from photonic PUF responses.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated a photonic PUF with 17.1-kbit key extraction from six designs.
• Confirmed the uniqueness and reproducibility of the generated keys.
• Experimentally verified the unclonability of the photonic PUFs due to fabrication variations.

Conclusions:

• Photonic PUFs based on chaotic silicon micro-cavities offer a promising solution for hardware security.
• The demonstrated technology provides a robust and unclonable source of private information.
• This approach enhances hardware integrity and secures sensitive data in electronic devices.