Hardware assurance with silicon photonic physical unclonable functions
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it