Intrinsic Random Optical Features of the Electronic Packages as Physical Unclonable Functions for Internet of Things Security

The increasing security threat is a serious challenge to the internet of things (IoT). Hardware‐based security primitive is an essential and powerful way to protect IoT devices from various attacks. But most of the current security hardwares are based on macrophysical features, which are usually produced by reproducible deterministic processes and can be copied by counterfeiters. Herein, a physical unclonable function (PUF) with high robustness based on the intrinsic random micro‐/nanostructures of the electronic packages is proposed thereby demonstrating a low‐cost and label‐free hardware security solution for IoT. Using the unique surface micropattern and the spatially coded laser scattering, the proposed PUFs can be used as anticounterfeiting labels, authentication tokens and cryptographic key generators. With the help of the proposed PUFs, the safety protection is still effective even when the attacker is able to get access to the database because the secret keys are inherently hidden in the complex microscopic stochastic physical features of the PUFs but not the database. The proposed package‐enabled PUFs provide a promising and practical physical protection solution for IoT security.