[ericpauley]

This is very reminiscent of Physical Random/Unclonable Functions[1]. When creating identifiers like this it's very important that they be non-reproducible. The article nearly touched on this with random patterns, but the important distinction is that the process must not be reproducible by the manufacturer even if they wanted to.

In [1], they propose timing artifacts in FPGAs as a means to achieve this. I imagine that some of the random material embeddings in the article may achieve this in practice, though it's important to actually quantify it.

[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.29...