Observational analysis shows the threshold current responsiveness to manufacturing defects is crucial for physical unclonable functions, indicating new pathways for secure authentication.
A physical unclonable function (PUF) leverages the unclonable random variations in device behavior due to defects incurred during manufacturing to produce a unique “biometric” that can be used for authentication. Here, we show that the threshold current for the switching of a magnetic tunnel junction via spin transfer torque is sensitive to the nature of structural defects introduced during manufacturing and hence can be the basis of a PUF. We use micromagnetic simulations to study the threshold currents for six different defect morphologies at two different temperatures to establish the viability of a PUF. We also derive the challenge-response set at the two different temperatures to calculate the inter- and intra-Hamming distances for a given challenge.
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Huber et al. (2025) studied this question.
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