You aren't wrong about the writing style. Reading it is a hard slog. > The idea here seem to be a security token that generates its own random key and never l

You aren't wrong about the writing style. Reading it is a hard slog. > The idea here seem to be a security token that generates its own random key and never lets it out of the device. That is an idea. It's one that's been around since the first pin pads were developed a few decades ago that have since evolved into the TPM's we have today. But it's not the idea being pushed here. What's being pushed here is a way of protecting the key. The answer to the question "if you have access to the key long enough to extract the key why do you need to clone it" is simple enough. It can resist giving up it's information until you prove you're you. Example: enter the wrong PUK in 8 times and it destroys it's secret key. It's another concept that's been around for literally decades. There are stories about people going to enormous lengths to extract the keys out of similar devices that will resist merely probing them. The one that sticks in my mind was Mondex, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex, where a University used an election beam to reconnect some test pins (which I presume performed a very similar function to the JTAG on this device) to extract secret keys. That "hack" killed Mondex, although "hack" is probably the wrong word. Mondex put up a $1M prize, and the hackers won it. There are also Youtube videos of people reverse engineering chips using little more sandpaper and a digital microscope. And they do that for little more than few seconds fame on Youtube. At the other end of the scale, the lengths people are willing to go to protect secret keys is extraordinary. Look up the price of HSMs some time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_security_module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_security_module So I say your wrong - a iron clad way of protecting the key really is a big deal. A cheap, true PUF (as they call it) would be a breakthrough. But after reading the article and the comments here - I have no idea if they've even moved the needle.