Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University , 130 Hudson Hall, Durham, North Carolina 27708, United States.
Department of Electrical Engineering, Harvard University , 33 Oxford Street, Room 308, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, United States.
ACS Nano. 2015 Dec 22;9(12):11840-8. doi: 10.1021/acsnano.5b04066. Epub 2015 Nov 10.
Modern authentication and communication protocols increasingly use physical keys in lieu of conventional software-based keys for security. This shift is primarily driven by the ability to derive a unique, unforgeable signature from a physical key. The sole demonstration of an unforgeable key, thus far, has been through quantum key distribution, which suffers from limited communication distances and expensive infrastructure requirements. Here, we show a method for creating unclonable keys by molecular self-assembly of resonance energy transfer (RET) devices. It is infeasible to clone the RET-key due to the inability to characterize the key using current technology, the large number of input-output combinations per key, and the variation of the key's response with time. However, the manufacturer can produce multiple identical devices, which enables inexpensive, secure authentication and communication over classical channels, and thus any distance. Through a detailed experimental survey of the nanoscale keys, we demonstrate that legitimate users are successfully authenticated 99.48% of the time and the false-positives are only 0.39%, over two attempts. We estimate that a legitimate user would have a computational advantage of more than 10(340) years over an attacker. Our method enables the discovery of physical key based multiparty authentication and communication schemes that are both practical and possess unprecedented security.
现代认证和通信协议越来越多地使用物理密钥代替传统的基于软件的密钥来保证安全。这种转变主要是因为可以从物理密钥中得出独特的、不可伪造的签名。到目前为止，唯一证明不可伪造密钥的方法是通过量子密钥分发，该方法受到通信距离有限和昂贵基础设施要求的限制。在这里，我们展示了一种通过共振能量转移 (RET) 器件的分子自组装来创建不可克隆密钥的方法。由于无法使用当前技术对密钥进行特征化、每个密钥的输入-输出组合数量巨大以及密钥响应随时间的变化，因此无法克隆 RET 密钥。但是，制造商可以生产多个相同的设备，从而实现了廉价、安全的经典通道认证和通信，因此可以在任何距离进行。通过对纳米级密钥的详细实验调查，我们证明了合法用户在两次尝试中成功认证的时间为 99.48%，错误警报率仅为 0.39%。我们估计，合法用户相对于攻击者具有超过 10(340)年的计算优势。我们的方法使得基于物理密钥的多方认证和通信方案的发现成为可能，这些方案既实用又具有前所未有的安全性。
