Chaotic Organic Crystal Phosphorescent Patterns for Physical Unclonable Functions

Abstract Since the 4th Industrial Revolution, Internet of Things based environments have been widely used in various fields ranging from mobile to medical devices. Simultaneously, information leakage and hacking risks have also increased significantly, and secure authentication and security systems are constantly required. Physical unclonable functions (PUF) are in the spotlight as an alternative. Chaotic phosphorescent patterns are developed based on an organic crystal and atomic seed heterostructure for security labels with PUFs. Phosphorescent organic crystal patterns are formed on MoS₂. They seem similar on a macroscopic scale, whereas each organic crystal exhibits highly disorder features on the microscopic scale. In image analysis, an encoding capacity as a single PUF domain achieves more than 10¹⁷ on a MoS₂ small fragment with lengths of 25 µm. Therefore, security labels with phosphorescent PUFs can offer superior randomness and no‐cloning codes, possibly becoming a promising security strategy for authentication processes.