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Cited by 2,018

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Physical One-Way Functions

Open access
Pappu, Ravikanth, Recht, Ben, Taylor, Jason, Gershenfeld, Neil·2002·Science

Abstract

Modern cryptographic practice rests on the use of one-way functions, which are easy to evaluate but difficult to invert. Unfortunately, commonly used one-way functions are either based on unproven conjectures or have known vulnerabilities. We show that instead of relying on number theory, the mesoscopic physics of coherent transport through a disordered medium can be used to allocate and authenticate unique identifiers by physically reducing the medium's microstructure to a fixed-length string of binary digits. These physical one-way functions are inexpensive to fabricate, prohibitively difficult to duplicate, admit no compact mathematical representation, and are intrinsically tamper-resistant. We provide an authentication protocol based on the enormous address space that is a principal characteristic of physical one-way functions.

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Crossref · 10.1126/science.1074376

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Metadata

Authors
Pappu, R., Recht, B., Taylor, J., & Gershenfeld, N.
Venue
Science
Published
2002-09-20
Volume
297
Issue
5589
Pages
2026-2030
ISSN
  • 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
  • 1095-9203
OpenAlex
W2169212403
Cited by
2,018
References
10
FWCI
9.03
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Physical One-Way Functions. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.1074376
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Pappu, R., Recht, B., Taylor, J., & Gershenfeld, N. (2002). Physical One-Way Functions. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1074376

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.