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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Electrically reconfigurable photonic PUF based on a moiré quasicrystal interferometer

Farhan Bin Tarik, Derrick Joyce, Yingjie Lao, Judson D. Ryckman

Published Jan 1, 2022• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Motivated by cryptographic applications seeking enhanced reliability and security, we demonstrate physically unclonable photonic circuits based on active quasicrystal interferometers with integrated micro-heaters. Small changes in electrical stimuli are shown to produce distinct optical fingerprints.
DOI
10.1364/cleo_at.2022.jw3a.30

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Abstract We demonstrate the uniqueness, unclonability and secure authentication of N = 56 physical unclonable functions (PUFs) realized from silicon photonic moiré quasicrystal interferometers. Compared to prior photonic-PUF demonstrations typically limited in scale to only a handful of unique devices and on the order of 10 false authentication attempts, this work examines > 103 inter-device comparisons and false authentication attempts. Device fabrication is divided across two separate fabrication facilities, allowing for cross-fab analysis and emulation of a malicious foundry with exact knowledge of the PUF photonic circuit design and process. Our analysis also compares cross-correlation based authentication to the traditional Hamming distance method and experimentally demonstrates an authentication error rate AER = 0%, false authentication rate FAR = 0%, and an estimated probability of cloning below 10−30. This work validates the potential scalability of integrated photonic-PUFs which can attractively leverage mature wafer-scale manufacturing and automated contact-free optical probing. Such structures show promise for authenticating hardware in the untrusted supply chain or augmenting conventional electronic-PUFs to enhance system security.
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Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are hardware security primitives whose inherent physical complexity can be exploited for secure authentication and cryptographic key generation. Silicon photonic devices, owing to their suitability for quantum and artificial intelligence applications alongside standard CMOS fabrication processes, constitute a highly promising substrate for integrated multifunctional PUFs. Despite the advanced security guarantees offered by quantum cryptographic protocols and the central role of silicon photonics in quantum technologies, quantum readout strategies based on single-photon states for photonic PUFs remain largely unexplored. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a silicon nitride (SiN) programmable photonic Mach Zehnder interferometer mesh that implements a unitary transformation and operates as a PUF, whose secret physical signature arises from uncontrollable waveguide variations during fabrication. Using experimentally derived parameters from the SiN integrated mesh, we further introduce and numerically evaluate a quantum readout protocol that combines single-photon states with PUFs. Maximally mixed quantum states are employed to conceal the underlying unitary transformation from passive eavesdropping. Security against adversaries possessing devices fabricated under similar conditions is assessed, with authentication performance quantified through Monte Carlo analysis of the false acceptance and false rejection rates as a function of the number of detected events and corrected errors. The results indicate exceptional performance with equal error rates as low as 10 to the minus 14, highlighting the potential of quantum secure PUFs for high security authentication applications.
In high-throughput network security applications, physical unclonable functions (PUFs) employing fixed mapping mechanisms are vulnerable to machine learning attacks. Reconfigurable PUFs can improve security by altering their mapping states, but often face constraints of limited reconfigurability, irreversible controllability, or high hardware overhead. Here, reversible and reconfigurable optical PUFs, 2RO-PUFs, were developed by two-beam manipulation of photothermal-sensitive scatterers with a precisely controllable phase transition. Experimental results verify that the programmed scatters and resultant speckle patterns exhibit deterministic and repeatable reconfigurability while maintaining cryptographic robustness. As demonstrated in a novel Internet of Things framework, the introduction of optically controlled speckle formation into PUFs frameworks enhances cryptographic security and flexibility while alleviating storage and computational overhead.