Harnessing Subatomic Effects for Product Authentication

Anon writes: "Israeli company Microtag claims to have come up with a way to avoid counterfits, and they mean everything from CDs to clothes to cash to vegetable seeds. Mix several micrograms of their 'magic powder' - which is engineered with a unique identification using the matter's spin - into your product - and later you can verify its authenticity with a relatively low-cost reader. Although their presumption is that no-one else will be able to create this 'magic powder' (which is probably only a matter of time and enough money), an Israeli article claims that Motorola and even the Bank of England are interested in the technology."

Comments

It's not really a "new technology"...

[bardencj]

The only thing that's new about this, as far as I can tell, is the low cost deployment. Consider what they do say about it:

- The technology uses materials with "very unique physical and chemical properties" at the "sub-molecular level."

- The reader is an RF "transceiver" which can detect the material in a manner analogous to "magnetic resonance imaging."

Sounds to me like they've build themselves a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometer that doesn't have to be very powerful due to bulk effects -- fire some RF at it, stop, then listen.

There's nothing keeping anyone from using a more powerful NMR spectrometer to isolate the material and reproduce it. So maybe they'd just lobby to have NMR spectroscopy outlawed as a "counterfeiting tool." Security through obscurity reigns...