The original paper <a href="http://www.nature.com/articles/srep16456" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/articles/srep16456</a> is named <i>"Using Quantum Confinement to Uniquely Identify Devices"</i><p>The main problem they are trying to solve is how to prevent reading out the chip level unique ids that are saved in IC. They solve this by using consistency in quantum level imperfections to generate chip level unique ids.<p>I am more interested about the claim presented in the BBC article: <i>"And the interesting thing is that you can't clone them. To clone them, you'd effectively have to measure [the fingerprints] atom-by-atom. You just can't do it."</i><p>Would this work because of the measurement uncertainty principle? I.e. you will change the state of something when you measure it? Or do they think that it is <i>just too complicated</i> to read out the key?