Experimental Evaluation of an Authentication System Using a Simply Implemented Scratch-Based Optical PUF

Recently, physical key replications has become easier, highlighting the growing need for new authentication technologies. This study focused on optical physical unclonable functions (PUFs). Optical PUFs use physical irregularities to generate unique identification information for each device, thereby providing increased tampering resistance. Optical PUFs are highly compatible with optical wireless communication (OWC), and their combination contributes to enhanced communication security. However, conventional optical PUFs face challenges in terms of their implementation complexity and cost. In this paper, a simply implemented scratch-based optical PUF is proposed. In the proposed method, scratches are applied to a transparent optical medium to create unique light paths, thus enabling a simple and practical optical PUF that achieves both high resistance to forgery and ease of implementation. Authentication is performed by comparing light paths images captured by a camera with reference data. To evaluate the decision accuracy of the proposed method, a prototype was developed, and 1.4 × 10<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">6</sup> trials were conducted. Based on the results, the proposed method exhibited a false negative rate of 8.75 × 10<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−4</sup> and a false positive rate of zero within 300 significant digits, which exceeds the accuracy of typical biometric authentication systems.