Thermally Engineered Multilevel Hybrid Encryption Device with Dynamic Erasure and Ultra-High Data Concealment Capacity

The escalating demand for secure data transmission has positioned encryption technologies at the forefront of information protection. Conventional encryption systems, whether purely hardware or software-based, risk major information leaks due to limited encryption levels and also fall short on dynamic erasability. Hardware based methodologies involving photonics-based encryption methods mostly deal with nano and micro-structures, particularly those capable of responsive erasure and regeneration. Thus far however, current techniques for modulating these architectures largely depend on network rearrangement, posing challenges for in situ regeneration. Furthermore, their common fabrication techniques are complex and uncontrolled. To address these fundamental limitations, we showcase a controlled thermal process strategy for fabricating large-area, dynamically tunable, 1D, 2D and 3D ordered microstructures on a wide range of compatible materials including optical glasses, metals and polymers. By controlled tuning of temperature changes in the system, along with the thermal expansion coefficients of thin films and substrates, surface energy, Young’s modulus, and film thickness, we show a precise control on their arrangement, thus enabling the fabrication of robust, uniform, and periodic patterns over large areas on soft and stretchable substrates. Building on this advancement, we demonstrate a hybrid multilevel encryption system. Our hybrid approach combines the strengths of both paradigms (hardware as well as software), while effectively eliminating their respective shortcomings. The resulting device is not only highly scalable and tunable, leading to dynamic erasure but also offers unprecedented security. With decryption probabilities as low as 10⁻⁵³ and 10⁻¹⁵⁵ with just 16 and 36 pixels respectively, our device sets a new benchmark in encryption technology, achieving a level of security never before demonstrated.