This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Behind every secure online transaction or encrypted message lies a string of completely unpredictable numbers. A team of physicists has now proposed a theoretical way around a long-standing roadblock, opening the door to next-generation security chips that protect everyday data without slowing performance.
In a study published in Physical Review Letters, a research team co-led by Rice University's Jun-Jie Zhang and Boris Yakobson describes a new class of materials. The research was conducted in collaboration with Shuai Dong, chair of the School of Physics at Southeast University in China. These materials, called autferroics, could speed up physical true random number generators (TRNG) thousands of times while keeping signals clear.
Security systems can lag under heavy use or become vulnerable to hacking if the random numbers driving encryption are generated too slowly or with weak signals. Inside these security devices, unpredictable thermal fluctuations within tiny magnetic switches generate the crucial numbers. Standard devices, however, trigger these microscopic jumps far too slowly.
Engineers can try to speed them up by shrinking the physical components or applying external magnetic forces, but doing so degrades the signal and leads to data-reading errors. Yakobson said the team's work grew out of exploring fundamental physical behaviors. "Our broader interest in TRNG, or how to extract entropy from physical behavior and convert it into random bits, focused mostly on charge-fluctuating entities in field-effect transistors," said Yakobson, the Karl F.
Hasselmann Professor in Engineering. "But when exploring the energy landscape of autferroics, especially the lower barrier separating opposite polarizations, Jun-Jie proposed this might lead to faster TRNG. It turned into a very fruitful collaboration with our recent report dovetailing with our previous one." By balancing the speed of physical random number generators with the clarity of their signals, the new device principle could, in theory, deliver high bit rates while maintaining signal clarity and stochasticity.
It could allow physical security chips to run at top speeds without introducing electronic reading errors. Zhang noted that the approach addresses key hardware bottlenecks. "This research could be useful for computing, data encryption and processing and other information technologies," said Zhang, a postdoctoral research associate in Rice's Department of Materials Science and Nanoengineering.
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