Flexible Physical Unclonable Functions based on non-deterministically distributed Dye-Doped Fibers and Droplets

TL;DR

This paper introduces flexible, dye-doped polymer films with embedded physical unclonable functions (PUFs) created via electrospinning and electrospraying, offering a practical, multi-level anti-counterfeiting solution with high complexity and low cost.

Contribution

It presents a novel manufacturing approach for flexible PUF-based anti-counterfeiting labels using dye-doped polymeric materials with multiple encryption levels.

Findings

Films encode thousands of cryptographic keys.

The fabrication process is simple and cost-effective.

The tags enable multi-level authentication.

Abstract

The development of new anti-counterfeiting solutions is a constant challenge and involves several research fields. Much interest is devoted to systems that are impossible to clone, based on the Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) paradigm. In this work, new strategies based on electrospinning and electrospraying of dye-doped polymeric materials are presented for the manufacturing of flexible free-standing films that embed different PUF keys. Films can be used to fabricate anticounterfeiting labels having three encryption levels: i) a map of fluorescent polymer droplets, with non deterministic positions on a dense yarn of polymer nanofibers; ii) a characteristic fluorescence spectrum for each label; iii) a challenge-response pairs (CRPs) identification protocol based on the strong nature of the physical unclonable function. The intrinsic uniqueness introduced by the deposition techniques encodes enough complexity into the optical anti-counterfeiting tag to generate thousands of cryptographic keys. The simple and cheap fabrication process as well as the multilevel authentication makes such colored polymeric unclonable tags a practical solution in the secure protection of merchandise in our daily life.