Abstract
We present a secure communication system constructed using pairs of nonlinear photonic physical unclonable functions (PUFs) that harness physical chaos in integrated silicon micro-cavities. Compared to a large, electronically stored one-time pad, our method provisions large amounts of information within the intrinsically complex nanostructure of the micro-cavities. By probing a micro-cavity with a rapid sequence of spectrally-encoded ultrafast optical pulses and measuring the lightwave responses, we experimentally demonstrate the ability to extract 2.4 Gb of key material from a single micro-cavity device. Subsequently, in a secure communication experiment with pairs of devices, we achieve bit error rates below 10-5 at code rates of up to 0.1. The PUFs' responses are never transmitted over the channel or stored in digital memory, thus enhancing the security of the system. Additionally, the micro-cavity PUFs are extremely small, inexpensive, robust, and fully compatible with telecommunications infrastructure, components, and electronic fabrication. This approach can serve one-time pad or public key exchange applications where high security is required.
Highlights
Maintaining confidentiality while communicating in the presence of adversaries forms the foundation of cryptology [1]
optical scattering PUFs (OSPUFs) are large and difficult to integrate into electronic circuits [6]
Mechanical positioning variability introduces inter-key noise that has not been fully mitigated by error correction coding, resulting in a system bit error rate (BER) of 1.7 × 10ିଵ at a highly inefficient code rate of only 0.035 [3,5]
Summary
Maintaining confidentiality while communicating in the presence of adversaries forms the foundation of cryptology [1]. To extract a binary key from a photonic micro-cavity PUF, we probe it with a rapid sequence of spectrally amplitude encoded, [11] ultrashort optical pulses [Fig. 1(a)] exciting a unique combination of spatial optical modes that interact with the fine-scale structure of the cavity interior and with one another via the optical nonlinearity of silicon [11,12]. This produces a sequence of ultrafast optical responses, each of which ideally contains independent, information-carrying spectro-temporal features that are sensitive to the cavity structure. A binary response sequence is computed from the measured analog pulse energy sequence using a post-processing algorithm (see the following section)
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