Advanced Materials‐Based Technologies for Security and Cryptographic Applications: Opportunities and Challenges
Sebastiano Strangio, Elisabetta Dimaggio, Damiano Marian, Alessandro Catania, Alejandro Toral-López, Francesco Pieri, Giuseppe Iannaccone, Gianluca Fiori · Advanced Functional Materials · 2026
ABSTRACT The widespread adoption of interconnected architectures, ranging from cloud systems to energy‐limited IoT and edge nodes, is redefining the challenges of hardware security, where trust must be physically anchored in the hardware itself, minimizing reliance on stored digital keys or power‐hungry post‐processing. True Random Number Generators and Physical Unclonable Functions constitute the fundamental building blocks for secure entropy generation and device authentication. CMOS‐based implementations have reached a high level of maturity, achieving remarkable progress in integration, stability, and scalability through sophisticated circuit‐level design strategies. However, further improvements are increasingly constrained by the limited physical entropy available within silicon‐based technologies. In contrast, emerging materials and device platforms, such as resistive and ferroelectric memories, 2D semiconductors, and electrolyte‐gated transistors offer richer stochastic dynamics and intrinsic variability, providing new degrees of freedom for entropy harvesting. This review surveys recent advances in this rapidly evolving field, emphasizing the interplay among material physics, device behavior, and circuit design, and highlights unified architectures that co‐generate entropy and identity within a single chip, leading to secure and energy‐efficient hardware for future IoT and edge platforms.