The technology, which is being patented at Lancaster University and is commercialised through the spin-out company Quantum Base located in InfoLab21, uses next-generation nanomaterials to enable the unique identification of products.
The research published last week in Nature’s Scientific Reports uses atomic-scale imperfections that are impossible to clone as they comprise the unmanipulable building blocks of matter.
Current authentication solutions base their security on replication difficulty, or on secrecy, and are renowned for being insecure and sometimes easy to forge. For example, current anti-counterfeiting technology such as holograms can be imitated, and passwords can be compromised. The ground-breaking atomic-scale devices do not rely on passwords, and are impervious to cloning. Coupled with the fact that they can be incorporated into any material makes them an ideal candidate to replace or augment existing security mechanisms.
Co-author Dr Utz Roedig, Reader in the School of Computing and Communications (SCC) at Lancaster University said: “We have been working on a means to identify electronic devices, such as mobile phones, with methods other than cryptography. For example, we looked at unique radio characteristics and clock drift behaviour for identification. In this project we teamed up with the Physics Department to explore the use of quantum confinements for the purpose of device identification.”
Researchers from the School’s centre of excellence, Security Lancaster, which innovates and creatively challenges the way that individuals, organisations and societies secure and protect themselves, were involved in the security analysis of the data provided by prototypes to determine its suitability for identification.
Writing in Nature’s Scientific Reports, the researchers said: “While inhomogeneity in the fabrication of nanostructures often leads to unpredictable behaviour of the final device, which is normally undesirable, we have proposed and demonstrated a potential use for the quantum behaviour of atomically irreproducible systems.”
Ibrahim Ethem Bagci, co-author of the paper and PhD student in SCC said: “This technology is a novel approach for hardware identification. One of the many possible application areas is defeating counterfeit electronics. Counterfeit electronics are currently a big challenge for semiconductor supply chain.”
The School, in collaboration with the Physics Department, is now looking into methods for producing the device on scale and at ways for it to be developed for use with existing products.