An NFC-Enabled Anti-Counterfeiting System for Wine Industry

Abstract

Wine counterfeiting has been posing significant challenges to wine industry, and has undermined the international wine trading market and the global economy hugely. The situation of counterfeiting has even been exacerbating in wine industry and global supply chain. There has been a number of anti-counterfeiting approaches which have been proposed and adopted utilizing different authentication technologies, in response to growing threats of counterfeiting to wine industry. The proposed NFC-Enabled Anti-Counterfeiting System (NAS) is developed for luxury-good industry such as wine industry, aiming at upholding provenance and authenticity of wine products from counterfeits via the product pedigree, transaction records and supply chain integrity maintained along the supply chain. Consumers can therefore safeguard their stake by authenticating a specific wine product with their NFC-enabled smartphones before purchasing at the retail points. NAS utilizes Near-field Communication (NFC), which has emerged as a promising technology and communication protocol for developing innovative alternatives, to facilitate the wine record processing of wine products and in turn combat wine and spirit counterfeiting. The integrated NAS is consisted of a wide range of hardware and software components, and the best combination of settings, parameters and deployments will therefore be identified. Other possible implementation issues, such as tag selection, tag programming and encryption, setup of back-end database servers and the design of NFC mobile application will also be discussed in this project. The critical design of NAS is vital not only to the key of product anti-counterfeiting of wine industry, but also to the strong foundation for other innovative supply chain solutions, such as the NFC-enabled purchasing system, developed on top of NAS with improved and integrated anti-counterfeiting functionalities.