Silicon Vacancies Diamond/Silk/PVA Hierarchical Physical Unclonable Functions for Multi-Level Encryption

Area of Science:

• Materials Science
• Cryptography
• Nanotechnology

Background:

• Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) offer enhanced security via unique physical identifiers.
• Multi-level PUFs improve reliability but face crosstalk challenges.
• Existing PUF technologies require advancements in tamper resistance and data protection.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a crosstalk-free, multi-level hierarchical PUF system.
• To enhance security and reliability in cryptographic key authentication.
• To explore novel materials and methods for advanced PUF applications.

Main Methods:

• Harnessing spontaneous phase separation of silk fibroin/PVA blend.
• Utilizing random dispersion of silicon-vacancy diamonds.
• Developing customized authentication algorithms (neural networks, Hamming distance, cross-correlation).
• Implementing M-ary encoding for enhanced coding capacity.

Main Results:

• Generated intricate, complementary, and independent random patterns at two distinct scales.
• Achieved time-efficient hierarchical authentication without interscale crosstalk.
• Demonstrated robust security and reliability resistant to replication and damage.
• Significantly enhanced coding capacity for multi-level encryption.

Conclusions:

• The hierarchical PUF system offers a promising solution for crosstalk-free multi-level encryption.
• The proposed system provides robust data protection and cryptographic key authentication.
• This technology has significant potential for immediate application in secure systems.