Scattering of Perfect Optical Vortex Beams: Physical Unclonable Function

Abstract

Now-a-days, data security has become an important part for anyone connected to the web. Data security ensures that data is getting transmitted securely without any modifications or alterations to the intended receiver. To achieve data security, we have focused on the cryptography which helps to protect our information from being stolen or third-party attacks. Encryption techniques demonstrate an excellent deal of data security when implemented in an optical system such as Holography due to the inherent physical properties of light and the precision it demands. Such systems are somehow vulnerable during their digital implementation under various attacks called crypt-analysis due to the predictable nature of security keys used for the encryption. In this work, we are presenting a Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) for producing a robust (stable over time) security key for digital encryption systems. More specifically, we have used the correlation functions of scattered perfect optical vortex beams for the generation of keys which can be used for encryption of data. Here, we convert the 2-D correlation function to 1-D key and digitize based on the average value which will be the random sequence of 1s and 0s. In the best of our knowledge, we are reporting this work for the first time. The experiment and simulation results are well matched.