  In this work the novel usage of a physically unclonable function composed of
a network of Mach-Zehnder interferometers for authentication tasks is
described. The physically unclonable function hardware is completely
reconfigurable, allowing for a large number of seemingly independent devices to
be utilized, thus imitating a large array of single-response physically
unclonable functions. It is proposed that any reconfigurable array of
Mach-Zehnder interferometers can be used as an authentication mechanism, not
only for physical objects, but for information transmitted both classically and
quantumly. The proposed use-case for a fully-optical physically unclonable
function, designed with reconfigurable hardware, is to authenticate messages
between a trusted and possibly untrusted party; verifying that the messages
received are generated by the holder of the authentic device.
