PUF

Nature Electronics: Chaotic VCSELs enable ultrafast photonic PUFs for dynamic authentication

1 min read · Tue, Jun 23 2026

News Research in Focus

Real-time authentication is becoming increasingly important for cloud services, data centers, and large-scale IoT systems, where static key management can be difficult to scale and vulnerable to leakage or modeling attacks. In our new Nature Electronics paper, “Physical unclonable functions based on chaotic vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers for dynamic authentication,” we demonstrate a photonic security system that uses chaotic vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers as high-speed entropy sources for dynamic authentication. The core idea is to generate security keys directly from the