SHF: Small:Enabling Practical, Secure, and Physically Unclonable Cryptographic Systems

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Cryptography provides a means of securing communications and authentication, e.g., between you and a bank, which has great utility in everyday life in both the physical and virtual world. An important underlying principle in cryptography is that an attacker must perform disproportionately more work than a legitimate user to achieve access to a resource. However, the threat of online fraud and the insecurity of weak passwords have grown to become a serious problem. This project will study methods for building secure, physical token-based systems from self-assembled nanostructures that are physically unclonable, yet practical for use in protecting digital communications channels. The goal of this research is to understand the fundamental science behind the operation of these devices and how to engineer more secure cyber-physical systems.The broader impact of this project includes three aspects: (1) the development of system-level modeling tools, (2) exploration of various approaches for informal science education based on the theme of self-assembly and cryptography, and (3) several supplemental lecture modules at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate level on this subject enhanced by recent research results.