RFID Solution to Counterfeit Products
By: Hubert Crowell
RFID, Radio Frequency Identification of products and the Internet makes it possible to insure
that any single product can only be sold once. Cryptography is not necessary to insure that a
once only sold item is not a counterfeit.
If a product can be tracked from the producer to the end user with a unique identification, and a
data base maintained when that product is sold, then it is a simple matter to prevent
counterfeiting. The pharmaceutical companies and their customers would benefit greatly by
solving the counterfeit problem.
When a product is scanned at the sales counter, that information would be sent to the company
data base and recorded as sold. If that identification were ever reported as sold again, it would
then be flagged as counterfeit. If an identification were reported as sold that was not produced by
that company, it would be flagged as counterfeit. This process could be used through the entire
distribution chain to insure that counterfeit product are not introduced at the distribution level.
When the same identification shows up in two different locations then it would signal that one of
them was counterfeit.
If the retailer scans the product and reports the transaction to the company that produced the
product, the buyer could be assured that the product is genuine.
Cryptography is useless because anyone with the right equipment can copy or produce the Data
Security Tag. So just being able to read the tag does not insure that it is not a counterfeit. You
would have to know if that was in fact produced by whom you think produced it and know that
there is not another one out there waiting to be sold or already sold.
This solution is only valid for products that should be sold to the end user once, such as pharmaceuticals. I would hope that if pharmaceutical companies are not already studying this approach, they would do so now so that I can be assured that I will get what I pay for.
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