Reconfigurable Optical Physical Unclonable Functions Enabled by VO Nanocrystal Films.

Optical physical unclonable function (PUF) is one of the most promising hardware security solutions, which has been proven to be resistant to machine learning attacks. However, the disordered structures of the traditional optical PUFs are usually deterministic once they are manufactured and therefore exhibit fixed challenge-response behaviors. Herein, a reconfigurable PUF (R-PUF) is proposed and demonstrated by using the reversible phase transition behavior of VO nanocrystals combined with TiO disordered nanoparticles. Both the simulation and experiment results show that the near-infrared laser speckle pattern of the R-PUF can be almost completely altered after the phase transition of VO nanocrystals, resulting in a reconfigurable and reproducible optical response. The similarity of the response speckles shows an obvious hysteresis loop during the rise and drop of temperature, providing a simple way to regulate and control the response behaviors of the R-PUF. More importantly, the hysteretic characteristic provides a new dimension to describe the challenge-response behavior of the R-PUF besides the laser speckle, providing an effective way to improve the security and encoding capacity of the optical PUFs. The proposed R-PUF can be employed as a promising security primitive for high robustness and high-security authentication and encryption.