I've seen PUF's come up a few times lately, and I'm bearish on them, so YMMV on this, however here's why. I'm a bit bothered that the article uses "hackers," a

I've seen PUF's come up a few times lately, and I'm bearish on them, so YMMV on this, however here's why. I'm a bit bothered that the article uses "hackers," as their threat actor, because the only meaningful threat actor in the design of new cryptographic primitives is a group of hundreds of other professional mathematicians and cryptologists employed by an adversary nation state. From purely a security architecture perspective (and not a working cryptographers perspective), they would need a way to be formally verified and testable, which hiding an entropy source in a sealed unit is not. If you want to do any serious applications, you need to go through NSA test labs, which as far as I know, these have not yet and it's a pretty high bar. Given they are physically unclonable, it doesn't provide any additional flexibility for updating key material, which means they are now physically unreplacable devices. That "it's just so random," only means it is random over a field of a certain size, and even then, I've seen "cryptographic" systems where the period of the sample (or sample size) from a random source was reduced to only a few usable bytes right after it was sampled. The entire history of crypto backdoors is about reducing the entropy of seeds and other primitives, so that these PUFs happen to produce noise doesn't change that. Further, the only reason anyone adopts crypto is because it is certified by NIST, and because institutions and certification bodies are like /dev/null for compliance risk, so the decisions are not based on the ability of users to reason about the crypto implementation. The source of risk in security right now are not in P/CRNGs so much as the orthogonal problem of verifying the integrity of implementations of cryptosystems that are well understood, a need which PUFs appear (to me) to specifically frustrate. DeFi has created more of a wild west than a renaissance in cryptography right now, and PUFs seem a bit predatory to me. I know there are some a-list crypto evaluators here, and I'd be interested in how these perceptions of mine are wrong.