Slashdot Mirror
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."
...but you can't cook that bean in this pot. You can use that pot but that pot wont work with your stove. You may want to call the manufacturer to get that other pot activated for your new stove.
o tagging of removable media, so cases of copyright infringment can be linked to the purchaser of the blank CDR
o tagging of currency, eliminating that pesky tax evasion, drug trade, and prostitution problems often associated with anonymity
Yes, this seems like wonderful technology. Really.
~~~
Mod him up for humor, just to throw a monkey wrench into his plans.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
A few buzzwords, the prefix NANO, and we're all supposed to swoon in awe of them...
Well, I say BULLSHIT... Unless they cut the crap, put up some details and explain themselves, I'm just going to have to assume this is yet another adventure in security through obscurity. We all know how well that works.
--Mike--
i've heard (un-substanciated) that the feds have been using a system like this for years with the various gunpowders and the lead that goes into bullets in various manufacturer's plants. same for other high-value items such as a) currency and b)nuclear materials....they've just kept reeeeal quiet about it, making it harder to easily duplicate some items, while at the same time, easier to track the origin of certian materials (different chemical markers are used per batch). does anyone know anything more about this? is this why those "explosive chemical" sensor at the airport work so well (supposedly? i've never seen one go off before)
moox. for a new generation.
The whole description makes sense if you read "UV" or "light" instead of "RF". Most likely, they are tagging objects with mixtures of fluorescent dyes or pigments--easy to apply, mostly invisible, easy to discriminate using filters, and easy to detect using pulsed UV light sources (perhaps the new UV LEDs). Different mixtures identify different objects, in analogy to visible light taggants.
This whole scheme seems like a way to authenticate your data that's been stored on paper.
For instance, a company can send out shipping and inventory forms with their "key" printed in the ink, which the buyer is wary of. That way, competitor can't falsify forms or orders or somesuch.
Or, and I think a really interesting application, schools can verify that students have actually turned in their own work. Sure, you can still copy, but there's nothing worse than having Bart Simpson scrawl his name down on your test and get accepted into the special school. =P
Whenever I hear claims of some company being "interested in" some technology, I imagine the following scenario:
(at trade show)
salesman: "Hey, we've got a magic powder that we can mix into stuff and do cool stuff with it and stuff"
joe schmoe:"Yeah, that would be kinda cool if you can make it work. Maybe then I'd even buy some of it for myself"
salesman:"What company do you work for Sir?"
joe schmoe:"Motorola. Why do you ask?"
It seems like someone is planing another adventure in venture capital. Improbable + investment = angry_shareholders + carribian_vacation.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Someone else mentioned that this makes sense if you say UV instead of RF - well that may be true but its hardly new. Here for example is a UV taggant that works on that principal.
It may well be that their selling point is that they _are_ using RF taggants because its too easy to check if a UV taggant has been applied to something (one of the uses of UV powder tags is to check which employee has touched eg a secure terminal. You have been warned!)
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...
Where did you get that business about entanglement from? I can't find it on the website. The thing is...on paper at least I think you could put together a pretty cool quantum authentication protocol - but I very much doubt that it would work in practice. The word 'entanglement' doesn't appear on their web site according to google. I can only think that you've made this up and have stumbled upon a cool idea by accident!
-- SIGFPE
You'll enjoy reading this then!
-- SIGFPE