US company Verayo has unveiled a low-cost radiofrequency identification (RFID) chip that it claims is unclonable, low cost and has onboard memory to store, add or edit user data.
The company believes this new chip opens up the use of its technology for a host of new applications, including secure authentication of pharmaceuticals and consumer goods, contactless loyalty and payment cards and event ticketing.
The company – formerly operating as PUFCO – focuses on the development of unclonable RFID integrated circuits (ICs) based on a technology known as Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
PUFs are tiny electrical circuits included within integrated circuit chips which exhibit a characteristic ‘fingerprint’ in response to a given stimulus. The variations cannot be controlled, modelled or replicated, claims Verayo, and this effectively rendering each PUF-based IC physically unclonable.
In essence, Verayo exploits the physical characteristics of the silicon and variations in the IC manufacturing process to identify each silicon chip and determine its authenticity, without requiring encryption keys or encryption storage.
The new chip – dubbed the Vera M1HW – “extends the benefit of PUF technology to new applications where data stored on the chip has to be securely accessed and changed,” according to Verayo’s chief executive Anant Agrawal.
Adoption of item-level RFID has been slow to take off in pharmaceuticals, in part because of cost considerations but also because it is perceived that the accuracy of the technology is not sufficient and fears that the technology may interact with certain drugs, such as biologics.
Security has also been a consideration. Aside from issues of patient confidentiality, there are concerns that counterfeiters could clone unsecured tags to inveigle fake medicine into the supply chain or ‘up-label’ a low-dose to a high-dose product.
Verayo believes its unclonable RFID tags bring the required security to the pharmaceutical industry, without dramatically hiking costs.
The company first launched an unclonable chip (the Vera X512H) back in 2008 which required a network to access a back-end server for authentication. The range was extended earlier this year with the Vera M4H, which supported offline authentication, and the new product rounds out the range.
SecuringPharma.com