Date of Award

2023

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE)

Department

Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering

First Advisor

Tao Wei

Abstract

As devices grow increasingly interconnected, the need to identify them has grown. While current identification technology like barcodes, QR codes, digital magnetic strips, and RFID exist, they all share the shortcoming of reproducibility, something undesired for a unique identifier. Posing as an alternative, physical unclonable functions (PUF) rely on random physical properties of materials generated when manufactured, patterns that are unique and can't be reproduced, like a fingerprint. Optical fibers can be used as PUFs given that they produce a unique reflection pattern as a function of distance, a Rayleigh scatter pattern. Therefore, this research aims to build a reader, recorder, and comparator of this unique fiber identification information, a fiber ID reader, while specifically focusing on improving the form factor of the data acquisition.

A prototype fiber ID reader was designed using a computer controlled oscilloscope and optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR). The data acquisition system was minimized by using an FPGA system on chip (SoC), the Red Pitaya. RoC plots of the system were taken while testing different lengths of test fiber, with the smallest length having an EER of 10%.

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