A team of British scientists has developed a new technology that “could be used to authenticate any electronic equipment and be 100% secure,” according to one of the researchers.
The technology revolves around nano-scale metallic structures. They feature built-in imperfections that effectively couldn’t be reproduced, given their atomic scale – “You just can’t do it,” Dr. Roberts said. In the terminology used by the researchers, these UNOs (“unique objects”) and “physically unclonable functions”, or PUFs, can be used as unique fingerprints, in a sense. By introducing design flaws to these UNOs – or “using fluctuations in tunnelling measurements through quantum wells in resonant tunnelling diodes (RTDs),” as the researchers put it in an abstract – the objects will render a unique output when some sort of authenticating stimulus is used to scan them.
The research echoes that of a team of South Korean researchers who developed artificial micro fingerprints measuring at only a small fraction of a millimeter. While those were designed to be read by actual fingerprint scanners, however, the British researchers nano identifiers are fingerprints only in the metaphorical sense, offering a unique means of authentication for electronic equipment such as microchips. The researchers are already trying to bring their technology to market via a startup called Quantum Base.
Sources: BBC News, Scientific Reports
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November 12, 2015 – by Alex Perala