Using MEMflakes™ is deceptively simple.  A MEMflake is essentially a tiny resonator that is created on silicon wafers similar to how other chips are made -- imagine a bell whose ring is its signature shrunk down to a nanoscale and placed on a chip.  A MEMflake can be made alone or along with other circuitry and then be placed on an object.  A compatible reader rings the bell, so to speak, and reads the unique signature, directly or via radio frequency.  The signature can then be compared against a list of valid signatures.  

The list of valid signatures does not have to be secure since knowing a valid signature does not help to recreate that signature.  The reason that no additional security measures are necessary is because of the unique nature of MEMS resonators. MEMflakes create signals that can only be made by MEMflakes while each MEMflake has some randomness to its given signal making it unique like snowflakes.  That means that imitating the signature is essentially the same as cloning the MEMflake.   The odds of cloning a particular MEMflake can be higher than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 or a trillion trillion. 

In addition there is little need for the chip to authenticate the reader, or for the reader to authenticate the chip.  No other computing power is necessary at the database level, either distributed or centralized, to make a match than a simple lookup.