Nano-Electro-Mechanical Tags for Identification and Authentication

Paper: Clandestine Nano-Electro-Mechanical Tags for Identification and Authentication

To appear in Microsystems & Nanoengineering, Nature, 2020.

Overview: Realization of truly unclonable identification and authentication tags is the key factor in protecting global economy from the ever-increasing counterfeit attacks. Here we report on the demonstration of nano-scale tags that exploit the electro-mechanical spectral signature as a fingerprint that is uniquified by inherent randomness in fabrication processing. Benefiting from ultra-miniaturized size and transparent constituents, these clandestine nano-electro-mechanical tags provide substantial immunity to physical tampering and cloning. Adaptive algorithms are developed for digital translation of the spectral signature into binary fingerprints. A large set of tags, fabricated in the same batch, are used to estimate the entropy of corresponding fingerprints with high accuracy. The tags are also examined under repetitive measurements and temperature variations to verify the consistency of fingerprints. These experiments highlight the potential of the clandestine nano-electro-mechanical tags for realization of secure identification and authentication methodology applicable to a wide range of products and consumer goods.

Fig: (a) The measured spectral signature of three NEMS tags with identical designs and fabricated in the same batch. The inset shows the 52-bit binary strings extracted for each tag. (b) The optically measured vibration patterns at six different resonance frequencies over the spectral signature.

Even though having identical designs and fabricated from the same batch, as shown in the above figure, the tags have different binary signatures because of the temperature variation. Thus, these different signatures can be considered as an unique identifier for the tags.