Voltage-Reconfigurable Magneto-Ionic Nanolayers in Dot Arrays for Probabilistic, Materials-Engineered Security...

The Big Data revolution demands advanced security solutions that are energy-efficient, scalable, and resistant to emerging threats. Conventional encryption, based on algorithmic complexity, is resource-intensive and increasingly vulnerable. To safeguard sensitive information, it is essential to develop innovative anti-hacking and anti-counterfeiting technologies that provide material-level protection embedded at the smallest length scales. Here, we present a selective magneto-ionic strategy for hardware-level security that exploits voltage-controlled N^3- ion migration within pre-defined paramagnetic FeCoN dot arrays. This enables the creation of reconfigurable sub-15 nm ferromagnetic sublayers with deterministic or probabilistic (single-domain↔vortex) states and voltage-tunable probabilities. These states facilitate robust magnetic fingerprinting and constitute self-protected primitives suitable for physical unclonable functions and in-memory probabilistic inference, while their stochastic orientation and chirality provide a platform for true random number generation. This architecture combines tamper resistance, low power consumption, and scalability, representing a significant leap toward next-generation hardware security rooted in ion-spin control at the nanoscale.