ABSTRACT Secure encryption lies at the heart of data protection across virtually every sector of modern society. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) provide an indispensable root of trust for ensuring this security. However, existing PUFs remain limited by two key constraints: a trade‐off between cryptographic capacity and physical footprint, and architectural vulnerabilities to both key‐centric interception and machine‐learning (ML) cloning attacks. Here, we introduce a hardware‐intrinsic, coherent‐spin‐mediated encryption architecture based on nanodiamonds (NDs) containing nitrogen‐vacancy (NV) centers. Spectral multiplexing of spin‐resonance channels directly transduces microwave‐programmed plaintext into the frequency and phase of coherent Rabi oscillations, yielding hardware‐specific temporal waveforms as physical ciphertext. Operating within a sub‐wavelength footprint, this process supports over 10 45 addressable encryption states, corresponding to an encoding density of approximately 721 bits µm – 2 , which represents the highest value reported for a physical‐security platform. The coherent quantum evolution of the NV spin ensembles, together with ND‐specific disorder, produces a complex, channel‐dependent plaintext‐to‐waveform transformation that proved difficult for the evaluated ML models to reconstruct, with predictive accuracy approaching the random‐guessing baseline. These results establish a new encryption paradigm, delivering an ultra‐dense, intrinsically unclonable encryption foundation for next‐generation secure devices.
ABSTRACT Secure encryption lies at the heart of data protection across virtually every sector of modern society. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) provide an indispensable root of trust for ensuring this security. However, existing PUFs remain limited by two key constraints: a trade‐off between cryptographic capacity and physical footprint, and architectural vulnerabilities to both key‐centric interception and machine‐learning (ML) cloning attacks. Here, we introduce a hardware‐intrinsic, coherent‐spin‐mediated encryption architecture based on nanodiamonds (NDs) containing nitrogen‐vacancy (NV) centers. Spectral multiplexing of spin‐resonance channels directly transduces microwave‐programmed plaintext into the frequency and phase of coherent Rabi oscillations, yielding hardware‐specific temporal waveforms as physical ciphertext. Operating within a sub‐wavelength footprint, this process supports over 10 45 addressable encryption states, corresponding to an encoding density of approximately 721 bits µm – 2 , which represents the highest value reported for a physical‐security platform. The coherent quantum evolution of the NV spin ensembles, together with ND‐specific disorder, produces a complex, channel‐dependent plaintext‐to‐waveform transformation that proved difficult for the evaluated ML models to reconstruct, with predictive accuracy approaching the random‐guessing baseline. These results establish a new encryption paradigm, delivering an ultra‐dense, intrinsically unclonable encryption foundation for next‐generation secure devices.
As advanced physical cloning and cyber-extraction techniques proliferate, achieving absolute hardware-level information security has become a paramount global challenge. Conventional architectures systems are fundamentally vulnerable because deterministic memory and cryptographic hardware are physically decoupled, exposing sensitive data to interception. While physical unclonable functions (PUFs) offer robust authentication, integrating them with high-density data writing within a unified nanoscale medium remains elusive. Here, we present an intrinsically secure all-in-one architecture that inextricably fuses high-dimensional data encoding with multiscale physical encryption within single nanodiamonds (NDs). Through precise focused-electron-beam irradiation, we achieve single-nanoparticle defect engineering, enabling deterministic base-36 data writing within individual NDs. Crucially, this customized memory layer is permanently locked within the medium's inherent stochasticity, combining macroscopic spatial PUFs with strictly irreproducible atomic-scale quantum fingerprints extracted via optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR). By seamlessly embedding deterministic memory into an unclonable physical environment, our approach intrinsically eliminates the vulnerabilities of separated hardware, providing an unconditionally secure solid-state foundation for tamper-proof memory chips, zero-trust networks and next-generation data vaults.
This whitepaper presents QRIC (Quantum Resonance Identity Core), a room-temperature hardware identity architecture that repurposes the layered NV-diamond platform developed for Quantum Resonance Core (QRC) into a security-oriented system for hardware-rooted cryptographic identity. Rather than treating fabrication variability in nitrogen-vacancy (NV) ensembles as a defect to be removed, QRIC treats manufacturing-induced stochastic resonance variation as an exploitable entropy source. The proposed architecture couples a silicon-carbide substrate, an NV-bearing synthetic diamond layer, an adaptive microwave-magnetic-optical control matrix, a photonic readout plane, and a classical security controller that performs challenge generation, resonance capture, drift compensation, and fuzzy key extraction. The result is a Quantum Physical Unclonable Function (Quantum PUF) concept intended to derive device-specific cryptographic key material without persisting a static secret in non-volatile memory. This paper defines the system model, physical basis, threat model, experimental workflow, prototype bill of materials, and validation metrics required to move QRIC from concept to laboratory demonstration. The manuscript is intentionally framed as a proposed architecture and experimental program rather than a claim of already validated performance.
Abstract Physical unclonable function (PUF) has emerged as a unique physical'fingerprint' that is inherently difficult to replicate. It shows tremendous application value in various hardware security areas such as identity authentication, chip anticounterfeiting, communication encryption, blockchain, etc. However, with the rapid development of 3D nanoprinting, classical PUFs constructed with disordered micro‐nanostructures face tremendous threats from physical cloning attacks. Herein, this study proposes and demonstrates the utilization of room‐temperature single‐photon emitters derived from atomic defects in randomly distributed pyramidal aluminum nitride (AlN) nanocrystals as a novel quantum PUF to resist physical cloning attacks. The fabrication of this quantum PUF on silicon (Si) wafers enables seamless integration with silicon photonic integrated circuits. The multidimensional fingerprint features of the single‐photon emitters are highly sensitive to the lattice parameters of the uneven AlN nanocrystals. Furthermore, each single photon emitter can work as a quantum random number generator to ensure the fundamental unpredictability of PUFs. The subatomic precision requirement coupled with unpredictable quantum emission behavior makes it practically impossible to attack the proposed quantum PUF, providing a promising solution for information security in the post‐quantum era.
Abstract A physical unclonable function (PUF) device leverages manufacturing randomness to generate a unique fingerprint for secure authentication, encryption, and counterfeit prevention. Optical PUFs (OPUFs) have gained prominence due to their strong security, light‐based challenge‐response mechanisms, and potential for quantum‐secure encryption. These devices have promising applications for hardware security, authentication, cryptographic key generation, and anti‐counterfeiting measures across multiple industries. This review enlightens the diverse material platforms used for OPUFs, ranging from fiber optics and liquid crystals to advanced semiconductor nanocrystals and plasmonic metasurfaces, each offering distinct optical characteristics that impact security strength. While no single material system dominates the field, hybrid and multi‐model approaches integrating low‐dimensional materials are being explored to enhance reliability and scalability. Finally, the challenges and future perspectives are outlined, including adaptive OPUFs architectures, utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) for challenge‐response generation, and their integration into quantum communication networks, highlighting how next‐generation semiconductor materials can further advance OPUFs technologies.
The rapid development of the Internet of Things and the digital information era has intensified the demand for secure hardware and information systems. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) provide a hardware-based approach by exploiting fabrication-induced randomness to generate unique, unclonable labels. Concurrently, advances in deterministic nanofabrication increasingly challenge the unclonability of conventional micro- and nanoscale PUFs, motivating the exploration of more fundamental sources of physical randomness. Here, we demonstrate an atomic-scale PUF architecture that leverages intrinsic randomness in solids through lattice and defect engineering. The resulting PUFs exhibit both three-dimensional spatial variability and atomic-scale configurational complexity, yielding extraordinary encoding space and uniqueness. For a characteristic feature size of 1 nanometer, the Shannon entropy is estimated at 17.49, underscoring the encoding capacity. Moreover, the embedded structure ensures intrinsic unclonability and robustness against environmental perturbations. These results establish atomic-scale PUFs as a fundamentally secure and scalable platform for next-generation hardware and information security.
Optical physical unclonable functions (PUFs) have emerged as a promising cryptographic primitive for next-generation security. However, to harmonize with various modern networks, conventional optical PUF is inadequate due to a rigid key space with a fixed specification. This study implements hierarchically controllable randomness sources for multi-level key generation, exploiting speckle characteristics. By adjusting illumination diameter, the speckle size can be modulated, allowing the extraction of three-level keys with various lengths: 64, 256, and 1,024 bits. Performance evaluation reveals that all levels are superb in uniformity, uniqueness, reproducibility, and randomness. Moreover, it is proposed two feasible applications. The first is a hierarchical authentication architecture that spans from Internet of Things (IoT) devices to sensitive information, balancing security and resources. The second is a multi-stage image encryption algorithm, exhibiting holocryptic performance superior to conventional XOR-based encryption. This versatile platform sets a new paradigm for optical PUF, establishing a foundation for robust and expandable next-generation security.