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1. An Integrated TRNG-PUF Architecture based on Photovoltaic Solar Cells

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MCE.2020.3019762  

   Degada, Amit; Thapliyal, Himanshu (August 2020, IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine)

   null (Ed.)

   The objective of the article is to present an integrated True Random Number Generator (TRNG) and Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) architecture using Photovoltaic solar cells. We illustrate that the Photovoltaic (PV) solar cell sensor response can be engineered into dynamic (TRNG) and static responses (PUF). The proposed prototype uses the iterative Von Neumann post-processing scheme to produce random bits with 34% better throughput compared to a single Von Neumann operation. The random bit quality was checked by statistical test suites from the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and achieves an average p-value of 0.45 at all variations in light intensity. The PUF response achieves 92.13% reliability and 50.91% uniformity. The integrated TRNG-PUF architecture is beneficial for resource-constrained Cyber-Physical System (CPS). 

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2. Physical Unclonable Function (PUF)-Based e-Cash Transaction Protocol (PUF-Cash)

   https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography3030018  

   Calhoun, Jeff; Minwalla, Cyrus; Helmich, Charles; Saqib, Fareena; Che, Wenjie; Plusquellic, Jim (September 2019, Cryptography)

   null (Ed.)

   Electronic money (e-money or e-Cash) is the digital representation of physical banknotes augmented by added use cases of online and remote payments. This paper presents a novel, anonymous e-money transaction protocol, built based on physical unclonable functions (PUFs), titled PUF-Cash. PUF-Cash preserves user anonymity while enabling both offline and online transaction capability. The PUF’s privacy-preserving property is leveraged to create blinded tokens for transaction anonymity while its hardware-based challenge–response pair authentication scheme provides a secure solution that is impervious to typical protocol attacks. The scheme is inspired from Chaum’s Digicash work in the 1980s and subsequent improvements. Unlike Chaum’s scheme, which relies on Rivest, Shamir and Adlemans’s (RSA’s) multiplicative homomorphic property to provide anonymity, the anonymity scheme proposed in this paper leverages the random and unique statistical properties of synthesized integrated circuits. PUF-Cash is implemented and demonstrated using a set of Xilinx Zynq Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Experimental results suggest that the hardware footprint of the solution is small, and the transaction rate is suitable for large-scale applications. An in-depth security analysis suggests that the solution possesses excellent statistical qualities in the generated authentication and encryption keys, and it is robust against a variety of attack vectors including model-building, impersonation, and side-channel variants. 

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3. Physical Unclonable Function (PUF)-based e-Cash Transaction Protocol (PUF-Cash)

   Jeff Calhoun, Cyrus Minwalla (January 2019, Cryptography)

   Electronic money (e‐money or e‐Cash) is the digital representation of physical banknotes augmented by added use cases of online and remote payments. This paper presents a novel, anonymous e‐money transaction protocol, built based on physical unclonable functions (PUFs), titled PUF‐Cash. PUF‐Cash preserves user anonymity while enabling both offline and online transaction capability. The PUF’s privacy‐preserving property is leveraged to create blinded tokens for transaction anonymity while its hardware‐based challenge–response pair authentication scheme provides a secure solution that is impervious to typical protocol attacks. The scheme is inspired from Chaum’s Digicash work in the 1980s and subsequent improvements. Unlike Chaum’s scheme, which relies on Rivest, Shamir and Adlemans’s (RSA’s) multiplicative homomorphic property to provide anonymity, the anonymity scheme proposed in this paper leverages the random and unique statistical properties of synthesized integrated circuits. PUF‐Cash is implemented and demonstrated using a set of Xilinx Zynq Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Experimental results suggest that the hardware footprint of the solution is small, and the transaction rate is suitable for large‐scale applications. An in‐depth security analysis suggests that the solution possesses excellent statistical qualities in the generated authentication and encryption keys, and it is robust against a variety of attack vectors including model‐building, impersonation, and side‐ channel variants. 

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4. Optical identification and anti-counterfeiting based on plasmonic core–shell nanoparticles with Fano resonance

   https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0262965  

   Vu, Nga; Farhat, Mohamed; Liu, Chien-Hao; Chen, Pai-Yen (May 2025, Applied Physics Letters)

   Fano resonance with an asymmetric and ultrasharp resonant line shape has been extensively studied in various light scattering scenes, unlocking several applications for sensing, information processing, and optical identification. Fano resonance appearing in multilayered nanoparticles (NPs) is particularly intriguing as its sharp and comb-like resonant line shape may enable optical identification at the nanoscale. We herein propose the concept of the optical physical unclonable function (PUF) based on the scattering responses of core–shell (plasmonic-dielectric) NPs. Specifically, the sharp, asymmetric spectral responses near the Fano resonance frequency, which are highly sensitive to perturbations (e.g., nanomanufacturing imperfections), can be exploited as a unique electromagnetic fingerprint for PUF-based identification and anti-counterfeiting applications. Here, we theoretically and statistically demonstrate that scattering from Fano-resonant multilayered NPs can be regarded as a perfect entropy source for the generation of PUF encryption keys, with outstanding performance in terms of uniqueness, randomness, encoding capacity, and NIST randomness test results. The proposed optical PUF opens pathways to implement nano-tags for optical identification, authentication, and anti-counterfeiting applications. 

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5. Reconfigurable Multilevel Optical PUF by Spatiotemporally Programmed Crystallization of Supersaturated Solution

   https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202212294  

   Kim, Youngchan; Lim, Jaemook; Lim, Ji_Hwan; Hwang, Eunseung; Lee, Hyunkoo; Kim, Minwoo; Ha, Inho; Cho, Hyunmin; Kwon, Jinhyeong; Oh, Junho; et al (April 2023, Advanced Materials)

   Abstract Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are emerging as an alternative to information security by providing an advanced level of cryptographic keys with non‐replicable characteristics, yet the cryptographic keys of conventional PUFs are not reconfigurable from the ones assigned at the manufacturing stage and the overall authentication process slows down as the number of entities in the dataset or the length of cryptographic key increases. Herein, a supersaturated solution‐based PUF (S‐PUF) is presented that utilizes stochastic crystallization of a supersaturated sodium acetate solution to allow a time‐efficient, hierarchical authentication process together with on‐demand rewritability of cryptographic keys. By controlling the orientation and the average grain size of the sodium acetate crystals via a spatiotemporally programmed temperature profile, the S‐PUF now includes two global parameters, that is, angle of rotation and divergence of the diffracted beam, in addition to the speckle pattern to produce multilevel cryptographic keys, and these parameters function as prefixes for the classification of each entity for a fast authentication process. At the same time, the reversible phase change of sodium acetate enables repeated reconfiguration of the cryptographic key, which is expected to offer new possibilities for a next‐generation, recyclable anti‐counterfeiting platform. 

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