Halide perovskite memristors as flexible and reconfigurable physical unclonable functions.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34140514.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-24057-0 and PMC identifier 8211866.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) address the inherent limitations of conventional hardware security solutions in edge-computing devices. Despite impressive demonstrations with silicon circuits and crossbars of oxide memristors, realizing efficient roots of trust for resource-constrained hardware remains a significant challenge. Hybrid organic electronic materials with a rich reservoir of exotic switching physics offer an attractive, inexpensive alternative to design efficient cryptographic hardware, but have not been investigated till date. Here, we report a breakthrough security primitive exploiting the switching physics of one dimensional halide perovskite memristors as excellent sources of entropy for secure key generation and device authentication. Measurements of a prototypical 1 kb propyl pyridinium lead iodide (PrPyr[PbI<sub>3</sub>]) weak memristor PUF with a differential write-back strategy reveals near ideal uniformity, uniqueness and reliability without additional area and power overheads. Cycle-to-cycle write variability enables reconfigurability, while in-memory computing empowers a strong recurrent PUF construction to thwart machine learning attacks.