Patent ID: 8032760

Claim:
A method of generating authentication data for authenticating a physical object, the method comprising acts of: measuring the object to generate a property set of the object using a measurement procedure; defining criteria; creating a robust property set of the object from the measured property set that meet a predetermined robustness criterion; creating a reduced property set from the robust property set, the robust property set includes less information on the actual properties of the object than the measured property set, wherein the criteria guides the creating acts; generating a control value in dependence on properties of the reduced property set; and storing the authentication data including the control value and the criteria that guides the creating acts together on a storage device, wherein the criteria that is stored as a portion of the authentication data is not a member of property sets utilized for generating the stored control value and the criteria that is stored as a portion of the authentication data is used for generating an authentication control value that is compared to the stored control value for authenticating the object.