  Cloning spare parts and entities of mass products is an old and serious
unsolved problem for the automotive industry. The economic losses in addition
to a loss of know-how and IP theft as well as security and safety threats are
huge in all dimensions. This presentation gives an overview of the traditional
state of the art on producing clone resistant electronic units in the last two
decades. A survey is attempting to demonstrate the techniques so far known as
Physically Unclonable Functions PUFs showing their advantages and drawbacks.
The necessity for fabricating mechatronic-security in the vehicular environment
is emerging to become a vital requirement for new automotive security
regulations (legal regulations) in the near future. The automotive industry is
facing a challenge to produce low-cost and highly safe and secure networked
automotive systems. The emerging networked smart traffic environment is
offering new safety services and creating at the same time new needs and
threats in a highly networked world. There is a crying need for automotive
security that approaches the level of the robust biological security for cars
as dominating mobility actors in the modern smart life environment. Possible
emerging technologies allowing embedding practical mechatronic-security modules
as a low-cost digital alternative are presented. Such digital clone-resistant
mechatronic-units (as Electronic Control Units ECUs) may serve as smart
security anchors for the automotive environment in the near future. First
promising initial results are also presented.
