There is disclosed a method of handling a sensor, comprising the steps of: defining a subset of sensor components of the sensor; challenging said subset under uniform conditions; receiving output signal values from said subset; for each component of the subset, determining the statistical moment of order i of the temporal distribution of the output signal value of said each sensor component; determining one or more outliers sensor components, said outliers sensor components being components whose ith order statistical moment has a difference with the mean value of the spatial distribution of the chosen moment over the subset superior in absolute value to a threshold, the ith order statistical moment of one sensor component being estimated on the temporal distribution associated to this sensor component. Developments describe in particular the use of imaging sensors, key generation, authentication, helper data files and the handling of videos.