Security News > 2022 > January > Researchers Use Natural Silk Fibers to Generate Secure Keys for Strong Authentication

A group of academics at South Korea's Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology have utilized natural silk fibers from domesticated silkworms to build an environmentally friendly digital security system that they say is "Practically unbreachable."

"The first natural physical unclonable function [] takes advantage of the diffraction of light through natural microholes in native silk to create a secure and unique digital key for future security solutions," the researchers said.

In other words, PUFs are non-algorithmic one-way functions derived from uncopiable elements to create unbreakable identifiers for strong authentication.

The newly proposed method from GIST employs native silk fibers produced by silkworms to create PUF-based tags that are then used to devise a PUF module.

The nanofibrillar structures in each microfiber significantly improves the light intensity contrast between the background and focal spots owing to the strong scattering," the researchers noted in a paper published in Nature Communications.

Should such a system be deployed for user authentication using a smart card, the researchers said that faking an authentication key generated from the module via a brute-force attack would take as long as 5x1041 years to crack it open, making it cryptographically unbreakable.

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