Simulation and Design of Electrochemical Dendrites for Physically Unclonable Security Tags

The colossal global counterfeit market and advances in cryptography including quantum computing supremacy have led the drive for a class of anti-counterfeit tags that are physically unclonable. Dendrites, previously considered an undesirable side effect of battery operation, have promise as an extremely versatile version of such tags, with their fundamental nature ensuring that no two dendrites are alike and that they can be read at multiple magnification scales. In this work, we first pursue a simulation for electrochemical dendrites that elucidates fundamental information about their growth mechanism. We then translate these results into physical dendrites and demonstrate methods of producing a hash from these dendrites that is damage-tolerant for real-world verification. Finally, we explore theoretical curiosities that arise from the fractal nature of dendrites. We find that uniquely ramified dendrites, which rely on lower ion mobility and conductive deposition, are particularly amenable to wavelet hashing, and demonstrate that these dendrites have strong commercial potential for securing supply chains at the highest level while maintaining a low price point.