Patent managed by Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL)
At the core of the innovation is a device that continuously operates without external power by utilizing quantum tunneling and integration of electrons. Millions of such solid-state devices can be utilized as timers to combine the benefits of both classical and quantum key distribution frameworks.
The devices act as dynamic, non-volatile memory to store measurements that can be retreived later, thereby enabling a battery-free datalogger. Long-term remote sensing is self-powered by omnipresent thermal and quantum fluctuations with activation energies in the attoWatt range.
For low-resource Internet-of-Things (IoTs) such as wearables, health-monitors, tags, and sensors, existing authentication techniques (using encryption, strong hash functions, and pseudorandom number generators) may prove impractical for securing access to critical data. This is because these IoT platforms have limited computational bandwidth; limited availability of energy; and require real-time authentication. Static identifiers like barcodes, product IDs, embedded physical unclonable functions (PUFs) or stored private keys are vulnerable to theft, counterfeiting, replay attacks, or tampering. Free Dynamics’s solution uses a proprietary hardware-software approach that can provide previously unattainable security levels for low-resource IoTs. Free Dynamics’s solution uses zero-power timers to generate dynamic tokens that are secure against any power side-channel attacks, eavesdropping and tampering. The hardware-software solution also supports mutual authentication, whereby the IoT device can also query and verify the trust of its reader and subsequent software upgrade transactions.
Reach us: contact@freedynamics.tech
President
Chief Science Officer
Academic/Business Advisor
Inventor
Continuous, battery-free operation of a sensor is shown by directly coupling a transducer into globally asymptotically stable monotonic dynamical systems based on quantum tunneling to achieve a sub 10 attojoule operating energy budget. Logging of cumulative action due to ambient mechanical acceleration was demonstrated.
The synch / desynchronization paradigm of two spatially separated dynamical systems can differentiate among passive Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices that are subjected to different variations in their ambient environment. Reliable and repeatable sensing of temperature and radio-frequency history are shown for three years.
We reported the first instance of a self-powered integrated circuit that is capable of time-stamping asynchronous mechanical events. Synchronization error as compared to an external standard clock was under 1% for 100 hours of operation, with minimum activation energy of the self-powered system measured to be 840 nJ.
Towards a more secure authentication protocol leveraging hashes of a dynamically evolving device. This enables time-evolving tokens to allow passive devices to verify a server identity without costly computation or traditional side-channel risks.
A solid-state self-powered timer, which exploits a self-compensating mechanism based on the quantum transport of electrons in standard CMOS devices are demonstrated. The operational duration is shown to exceed three years, with accuracy greater than 0.5%.
We received funding from Washington University in St. Louis's Skandalaris Center, through their Leadership and Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program. The Assure project will transition our technology out of academia, into a commercial venture.