Nanowerk November 18, 2022
An international team of researchers (Singapore, UK, South Korea) has developed a new type of hardware security device called physical unclonable function (PUF) using phase-change materials. They fabricated devices switch reversibly between the glassy amorphous state and crystal orderly state. Then they used the variation in the device’s electrical conductance to construct the PUF due to the inherent randomness arising from the manufacturing process, which is not shown by conventional silicon-based devices. They modelled the characteristics of actual phase-change devices to generate a simulation of many phase-change-based PUFs and tested their security using machine learning. They found that it was not possible for the encryption process to be learned and that the AI could not develop a model to decrypt the phase-change PUF. The phase-change PUF could also create a new key immediately through the reconfiguration mode if the key is hacked. According to the researchers the PUFs are secure against AI attacks compare to the traditional PUFs, scalable, more energy-efficient, and have the capacity to operate at high temperatures. It can be implemented to protect data across sectors and industries…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ