Random laser ablated tags for anticounterfeiting purposes and towards physically unclonable functions

Abstract

Anticounterfeiting tags affixed to products offer a practical solution to combat counterfeiting. To be effective, these tags must be economical, capable of ultrafast production, mass-producible, easy to authenticate, and automatable. We present a universal laser ablation technique that rapidly generates intrinsic, randomly distributed craters (in under a second) on laser-sensitive materials using a nanosecond pulsed infrared laser. The laser and scanning line parameters are balanced to produce randomly distributed craters. The tag patterns demonstrate high randomness, which is analyzed using pattern recognition algorithms and root mean square error deviation. The optical image information of the tag is digitized with a fixed bit uniformity of 0.5 without employing any debiasing algorithm. The efficacy of tags for anticounterfeiting is presented by securing the challenge associated with each tag. Statistical NIST tests are successfully performed on responses generated from both single and multiple tags, demonstrating the true randomness of the sequence of binary digits. The single(multiple) tag(s) achieved an actual encoding capacity of approximately 10³⁹¹ (10⁵¹⁸) and a low false rate (both positive and negative) on the order of 10⁻⁵⁸ (10⁻⁵⁰). Our findings introduce a laser-based method for anticounterfeiting tag generation, allowing for ultrafast and straightforward product processing with minimal fabrication and tag cost.

Methods to realise anticounterfeiting labels should be fast, easy to implement, cheap, and applicable to several different substrates. Here, the authors demonstrate how to use laser ablation to produce randomly distributed craters that can be used as anticounterfeiting tags.