Halide perovskite memristors as flexible and reconfigurable physical unclonable functions

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 1kb 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. Despite the impressive demonstrations with silicon and oxide memristors, realizing efficient roots of trust for resource-constrained hardware remains a challenge. Here, the authors exploit switching behavior in one dimensional perovskite memristors to design security primitives for key generation and device authentication.

Automated summary

The study explores the use of one-dimensional halide perovskite memristors to design security primitives for key generation and device authentication, offering a new solution to the challenge of efficient roots of trust for resource-constrained hardware.