Classical security solutions generally rely upon assumptions of certain mathematical tasks being 'hard' to perform, but 'easy' to verify solutions for. This lack of provable security has lead to research of protocols which are provably secure mathematically, using the laws of physics as opposed to unproven assumptions.
One set of manifestations of such research for device authentication is Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). Quantum-Optical PUFs are physical devices whose microscopic features and imperfections are inherently random, unique, and unclonable, and these features may be exhibited by their wavelength light emissions. I shall discuss the mathematical challenges associated with capturing the uniqueness inherent to these devices, and the processing of such information for assessment against a suitable set of figures of merit, in order to generate unique fingerprints for device authentication.