Encryption On Surfaces: Meet DASAs

We are faced with an ever-increasing number of fake goods and spoof devices. So how can we best identify that an object is what it is meant to be? Along with this, if we can identify something uniquely, we could track it journey and pick up key information that could be used for its life cycle understanding. This research is often defined as supporting a PUF — Physically Unclonable Function.

Now a research team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has come up with a way of creating stimuli-responsive materials for data encryption and anti-counterfeiting. This relates to work related to the study of smart photochromic and luminescent tissues related to the camouflage and cloaking methods found in nature [here][1]:

In the research, they used multi-responsive donor-acceptor Stenhouse adducts (DASAs). DASAs were discovered in 2014 and are photoswitchable compounds that have donors, acceptors, and bridges. These are tuned with light between 450 and 750 nm, but, in previous work, researchers have generally struggled to control their operation.

The paper outlines how previous work on combination logic using DASAs [A, B in Figure 2] has been expanded to drive a state drive…