Optically reconfigurable physical unclonable functions based on 2D MoS2 ring-oscillator arrays for attack-resistant hardware authentication
. The system exhibits spectrally selective frequency shifts under red, green, and blue (RGB) illumination, establishing a dynamic optical entropy dimension that enables on-demand, reversible rekeying without hardware modification. We develop a robust key-generation pipeline combining within-chip normalization, random-projection q-ary quantization, and the Secure Hash Algorithm 256 (SHA-256) privacy amplification, followed by hash-based message authentication code (HMAC)-based key derivation. The resulting keys demonstrate near-ideal uniformity (~50%) and inter-device Hamming distance (~0.677 at q = 3, 39 ~ 0.761 at q = 4), while remaining resilient to advanced machine learning attacks (≤ 52% accuracy). We further demonstrate image encryption and authentication with noise-like ciphertexts and reliable tamper detection. This work introduces a promising class of material-intrinsic, optically addressable security primitives for trusted edge computing applications.
Authors
- Rong Yang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6112-3149)
- Na Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9190-1167)
- Hongyue Du
- Xingchao Zhang
- Tong Li
- Haoyang Cheng
- Liangfeng Huang
- Yixiao Li
- Qing Guan
- Yuchao Zhou
- Yi Zhe Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6303-385X)
- Guangyu Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1242-4391)
- Hua Yu
Institutions
- Hunan University (CN)
- Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory (CN)
- FZU ‒ Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (CZ)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2026-04-28
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-72557-8
- Primary Topic
- Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- National Key Research and Development Program of China