Staff

Riboli Francesco (CNR-INO, Contact Person)
Sara Nocentini (INRiM, Contact Person)

PhD and Post-Doc

Simone Donato

Serena Salvestrini
Federico Maestri

Former members

Giuseppe Emanuele Lio (CNR-Nano)

Federico Massarelli

Worldwide data exchange requires an increasingly reliable and secure authentication system to protect sensitive and private information. The ”Cyber physical security of complex photonic systems ” laboratory aims to study and manufacture Optical Physical Unclonable Functions (O-PUF) to generate cryptographic keys with a large entropic-informative content, thus overcoming the limitations of the present technologies based on electronic hardwares whose resistance to tampering is under debate due to the advent of artificial intelligence. 

The CYPHER-LAB team characterizes the O-PUFs based on the ” challenge-response pairs” (CRPs) scheme, and studies the role of disorder (deterministic and non-deterministic, with more or less structural correlations) and the properties of nanostructured materials to increase the complexity and resistance of O-PUFs to machine learning attacks. Combining optical nonlinearity of the scattering potential of cryptographic primitives, this laboratory aims to establish a new, highly secure cryptographic routine taking advantage of a multidisciplinary approach that combines material science, disordered photonics and information theory.

The CYPHER-LAB of INO-CNR, located at Sesto Fiorentino, is one of the main promoters of this research in Italy. Thanks to the funding of international projects and extensive national and international collaborations, researchers are studying the fundamental mechanisms of light-matter interaction in complex photonic systems.

PhD and Post-Doc

Simone Donato

Serena Salvestrini

PHOTAG aims to develop a low-cost, multi-level security and easy-to-use anti-counterfeiting label for optical metadata encoding. Photonic QR codes for product identification will be patterned in photo-polymerizable liquid crystalline (LC) materials using different manufacturing techniques, enabling labels with different sizes, scalability, and information density capabilities. 

The random defects of the photonic label will serve as unclonable features that, through optical interrogation protocols based on a challenge-response pair scheme, will uniquely authenticate the product. 

Reconfigurability enhances O-PUF security allowing to complete erase information in case of malicious attack. Through a simple process (second source light illumination) a new O-PUF is created making its cryptographic keys hard to be predicted. Polymer dispersed liquid crystals is a class of light responsive and easy to manufacture material that in addition to the randomly dispersion of liquid crystal droplet represents a good candidate for Reconfigurable O-PUF development.

Two-photon Direct Laser Writing enables the fabrication of shape-changing microstructures that can be exploited in stimuli responsive microrobotics and photonics. The use of Liquid Crystalline Networks allows to realise 3D micron-sized objects that can contract anisotropically, along a specific direction in response to stimuli (temperature or light). We demonstrate the fabrication of free-standing LCN microstructures as graphical units of a couvert tag for simple physical and optical encryption. The reading mechanism is based on a specific shape-change of each pixel so that once the stimulus is removed and the pixels recover their original shape the message remains completely hidden.