  The scope of this paper is to demonstrate a fully working and compact
photonic Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) device capable of operating in real
life scenarios as an authentication mechanism and random number generator. For
this purpose, an extensive experimental investigation of a Polymer Optical
Fiber (POF) and a diffuser as PUF tokens is performed and the most significant
properties are evaluated using the proper mathematical tools. Two different
software algorithms, the Random Binary Method (RBM) and Singular Value
Decomposition (SVD), were tested for optimized key extraction and error
correction codes have been incorporated for enhancing key reproducibility. By
taking into consideration the limitations and overall performance derived by
the experimental evaluation of the system, the designing details towards the
implementation of a miniaturized, energy efficient and low-cost device are
extensively discussed. The performance of the final device is thoroughly
evaluated, demonstrating a long-term stability of 1 week, an operating
temperature range of 50C, an exponentially large pool of unique
Challenge-Response Pairs (CRPs), recovery after power failure and capability of
generating NIST compliant true random numbers.
