Nanotechnology

Cryptography

Crystallography

Memristor

Engineering

Perovskite (structure)

Embedded system

Halide

Inorganic chemistry

Chemistry

Materials science

Electronic engineering

Computer science

Physical unclonable function

Computer security

Optoelectronics

Nature Communications

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[PbI3]) 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.

Halide perovskite memristors as flexible and reconfigurable physical unclonable functions