Quantum PUF and its Applications with Information Theoretic Analysis

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have garnered significant attention for their potential in enhancing the security of IoT devices, offering an alternative to traditional computational-based approaches. Despite their potential, classical PUFs suffer from critical drawbacks, including vulnerability to machine learning attacks and inadequate defense against quantum adversaries. To address these limitations, alternative architectures utilizing quantum mechanical principles, known as Quantum PUFs (QPUFs), have been proposed. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the diverse range of QPUFs, detailing their architectures and security features. Additionally, it explores the information-theoretic applications of QPUFs in IoT, including secret key generation, secure storage, authentication, and identification. The findings indicate that classical results translate effectively to the quantum domain in most cases, with QPUFs exhibiting larger capacity regions compared to their classical counterparts.