Mahdian Mohammad Amin, Taheri Ebadollah, Rahbardar Mojaver Kaveh, Nikdast Mahdi
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Sci Rep. 2024 Oct 26;14(1):25591. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-72922-x.
In the modern landscape of optical communication networks, ensuring robust security is increasingly critical, particularly for applications requiring seamless integration and minimal attack surfaces. Photonic Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) leverage the response from the photonic devices that are prone to inherent physical variations to generate unique and unpredictable signature identifiers which are then utilized by an authentication system for identification or encryption purposes. These photonic PUFs can be cohesively integrated into systems that use optical communication, whereas using electronic PUFs would introduce additional vulnerabilities due to the need for signal-domain conversions between optical and electronic signals. In this paper, we present the design, fabrication, and experimental evaluation of advanced silicon-photonic-based PUFs utilizing Contra-Directional Coupler (CDC) structures. These structures offer a complex design space and are intrinsically sensitive to fabrication-process variations, making them ideal for creating unique and secure responses. We introduce several innovative design enhancements, including randomized corrugation functions, perforated designs, and ring-assisted CDCs, to increase the complexity and unpredictability of the CDC response. Measurement results from the fabricated CDCs demonstrate their capability to achieve an average Hamming distance threshold of over 0.2, effectively distinguishing between legitimate devices and their copies. We rigorously tested these fabricated designs against three different machine-learning-based attack scenarios. The results showed a Hamming distance of over 0.4 with a standard deviation of less than 0.01 at a quantization level of three, using 10,000 samples of challenge-response pairs. These findings underscore the potential of silicon photonic PUFs in enhancing security for optical communication systems of different scales. The integration of such photonic PUFs offers robust and reliable security solutions for applications where traditional electronic methods introduce additional attack surfaces and fail to provide adequate protection.
在现代光通信网络领域，确保强大的安全性变得越来越关键，特别是对于那些需要无缝集成且攻击面最小的应用。光子物理不可克隆函数（PUF）利用光子器件因固有物理变化而产生的响应来生成独特且不可预测的签名标识符，然后认证系统利用这些标识符进行身份识别或加密。这些光子PUF可以紧密地集成到使用光通信的系统中，而使用电子PUF由于需要在光信号和电信号之间进行信号域转换，会引入额外的漏洞。在本文中，我们展示了利用反向定向耦合器（CDC）结构的基于先进硅光子的PUF的设计、制造和实验评估。这些结构提供了复杂的设计空间，并且对制造工艺变化具有内在敏感性，使其成为创建独特且安全响应的理想选择。我们引入了几种创新的设计改进，包括随机波纹函数、穿孔设计和环形辅助CDC，以增加CDC响应的复杂性和不可预测性。制造的CDC的测量结果表明，它们能够实现超过0.2的平均汉明距离阈值，有效地区分合法设备及其副本。我们针对三种不同的基于机器学习的攻击场景对这些制造的设计进行了严格测试。结果表明，在量化级别为三时，使用10,000个挑战 - 响应对样本，汉明距离超过0.4，标准差小于0.01。这些发现强调了硅光子PUF在增强不同规模光通信系统安全性方面的潜力。这种光子PUF的集成可为传统电子方法引入额外攻击面且无法提供充分保护的应用提供强大且可靠的安全解决方案。
