Chaotic Organic Crystal Phosphorescent Patterns for Physical Unclonable Functions

Area of Science:

• Materials Science
• Cryptography
• Internet of Things (IoT) Security

Background:

• The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices necessitates robust security systems due to increased information leakage and hacking risks.
• Traditional security measures face challenges in the evolving digital landscape, driving the need for advanced authentication methods.
• Physical unclonable functions (PUF) are emerging as a promising alternative for secure identification and authentication.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop novel security labels utilizing chaotic phosphorescent patterns for physical unclonable functions (PUF).
• To investigate the potential of organic crystal and atomic seed heterostructures on MoS2 for high-capacity encoding.
• To evaluate the effectiveness of these phosphorescent PUFs as a secure authentication strategy.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of phosphorescent organic crystal patterns on a MoS2 substrate.
• Characterization of the microscopic disorder and macroscopic appearance of the organic crystal patterns.
• Image analysis to quantify the encoding capacity of individual PUF domains on MoS2 fragments.

Main Results:

• Development of security labels based on chaotic phosphorescent patterns derived from an organic crystal and atomic seed heterostructure.
• Observation of highly disordered features at the microscopic scale within the organic crystals, despite macroscopic similarity.
• Achieved an encoding capacity exceeding 10^17 per single PUF domain on a 25 µm MoS2 fragment.

Conclusions:

• Security labels incorporating phosphorescent PUFs demonstrate superior randomness and inherent no-cloning properties.
• The developed phosphorescent PUF technology presents a promising and robust security strategy for authentication processes.
• This approach offers a viable solution to enhance security in the context of the 4th Industrial Revolution and widespread IoT adoption.