Abstract
Modern society is striving for digital connectivity that demands information security. As an emerging technology, printed electronics is a key enabler for novel device types with free form factors, customizability, and the potential for large-area fabrication while being seamlessly integrated into our everyday environment. At present, information security is mainly based on software algorithms that use pseudo random numbers. In this regard, hardware-intrinsic security primitives, such as physical unclonable functions, are very promising to provide inherent security features comparable to biometrical data. Device-specific, random intrinsic variations are exploited to generate unique secure identifiers. Here, we introduce a hybrid physical unclonable function, combining silicon and printed electronics technologies, based on metal oxide thin film devices. Our system exploits the inherent randomness of printed materials due to surface roughness, film morphology and the resulting electrical characteristics. The security primitive provides high intrinsic variation, is non-volatile, scalable and exhibits nearly ideal uniqueness.
Highlights
Modern society is striving for digital connectivity that demands information security
electrolyte-gated transistors (EGTs) operate at low voltages (≤2.0 V) and show circuit performances ranging from several hundreds of Hz until kHz57–60
In our hybrid physical unclonable functions (PUFs) approach, we exploit the implicit random variations caused by the material composition, layer thickness and roughness, as well as interface properties between several printed layers as a source of randomness for hardware security
Summary
Modern society is striving for digital connectivity that demands information security. Information security is mainly based on software algorithms that use pseudo random numbers In this regard, hardwareintrinsic security primitives, such as physical unclonable functions, are very promising to provide inherent security features comparable to biometrical data. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, hardware-intrinsic security solutions based on unique device parameters are deployed These security primitives are referred to as physical unclonable functions (PUFs), which are used for identification, authentication, and cryptographic key generation[12,13,14,15]. Other works on promising novel materials and methods concentrate on fingerprint-alike intrinsic counterfeit protection using random surface patterns[25,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41] These approaches need high-cost equipment such as microscopes, image processing, and optical readout for reliable key generation. To the best of our knowledge, designing, fabricating, and embedding a printed PUF core into a system level environment as well as the experimental analysis of PUF security metrics has not been presented before
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