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

This paper presents a universal laser ablation technique for rapidly generating intrinsic, randomly distributed craters on laser-sensitive materials. The technique uses a nanosecond pulsed infrared laser, balancing laser and scanning line parameters to achieve high randomness in the resulting patterns. The digitized tag patterns, with a fixed bit uniformity of 0.5, are analyzed using pattern recognition algorithms and statistical NIST tests, demonstrating true randomness and high encoding capacity (approximately 10³⁹ for single tags and 10⁵¹ for multiple tags). This laser-based method offers ultrafast, straightforward, and cost-effective anticounterfeiting tag generation.

Srinivas Gandla, Jinsik Yoon, Cheol-Woong Yang, Hyung June Lee, Wook Park, Sunkook Kim