Shannon Egan, Deep Science Ventures
How does a chip prove its identity? As networked IoT devices and AI clusters increasingly handle and transmit sensitive data, strong device authentication has become more central to commodity hardware design. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are one way of providing unique device identifiers, leveraging natural variations in the manufacturing process to create a "silicon fingerprint." By tracing PUFs from their origins in smart card security to their emerging role in data centre silicon, I will explain what PUFs uniquely offer and why these properties matter: from device physics, to attacks on OTP memory and implementation challenges.
Shannon Egan is a physicist and multi-disciplinary researcher whose peer-reviewed work spans neuroscience, particle physics, quantum materials, and spintronic device applications in computing. Her research on entropy generation in emerging memory technologies drew her attention to the physical properties underpinning hardware security primitives and secure memory systems. She now leads R&D and product definition in these areas for an early-stage company incubated at Deep Science Ventures.
