A Lightweight Authentication Scheme with PE-Based Unclonable Label

With the maturity of printed electronics (PE) technology, the market of PE products grows rapidly. Meanwhile, as PE products usually carry plenty of sensitive information, the anti-counterfeiting has become an important security issue that cannot be ignored. Physical unclonable function (PUF) as an emerging security primitive that can be used to uniquely identify products, has received widespread attention. In this paper, we propose an optical unclonable label (OUL) compatible with the PE process and the pattern is flexible enough, released from the constraints of circuits, which only introduces slight area overhead suitable for the ultra-low-cost PE products. Then, a robust ID extraction algorithm is designed to build lightweight authentication system, which can effectively reduce storage cost while maintaining the uniqueness and reliability of OUL. In addition, a pseudo label recognition is added to resist forged labels, which utilizes the overall sample statistics to provide double insurance. To evaluate the effect of proposed method, 100 OULs are printed, receiving an overall identification certainty of 14.17σ and best figure of merit (FoM) of 0.29, which shows great attraction to the current anti-counterfeiting scheme.