In this paper we advocate a new approach to item identification based on physical unclonable features. Being unique characteristics of an item, these features represent a kind of unstructured random code-book that links the identification problem to digital communications via composite hypothesis testing. Besides this, complexity, memory storage and universality constraints should be taken into account for databases with several hundred millions entries. Therefore, we attempt to find a trade-off between performance, security, memory storage and universal-ity constraints. A practical suboptimal method is considered based on our reference list decoding (RLD) framework. Similar setup is extended to the authentication problem.