On-Chip Silicon Optical Scattering Physical Unclonable Function Towards Hardware Security

Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) serves as a physical security primitive that cannot be feasibly duplicated and has diversified applications in the field of hardware security. Although optical PUF is regarded as one of the most promising PUF due to high information capacity, conventional image-based optical PUF generally suffers from notorious sensitivity to mechanical alignment and difficulty in integrating with electronic circuits. Here we propose a novel silicon optical scattering PUF (SOSPUF) with its optical components integrated on Silicon on Insulator (SOI) platform, yielding easy-to-integrate and easy-to-use merits over conventional optical PUF. In the disordered scattering region, the randomly distributed holes are introduced to enhance security of SOSPUF. The uniqueness, unpredictability and reliability properties of SOSPUF are demonstrated via numerical simulations. This work provides a solid basis for the design and implementation of SOSPUF.