Abstract
Automatic recognition of unique characteristics of an object can provide a powerful solution to verify its authenticity and safety. It can mitigate the growth of one of the largest underground industries—that of counterfeit goods–flowing through the global supply chain. In this article, we propose the novel concept of material biometrics, in which the intrinsic chemical properties of structural materials are used to generate unique identifiers for authenticating individual products. For this purpose, the objects to be protected are modified via programmable additive manufacturing of built-in chemical “tags” that generate signatures depending on their chemical composition, quantity, and location. We report a material biometrics-enabled manufacturing flow in which plastic objects are protected using spatially-distributed tags that are optically invisible and difficult to clone. The resulting multi-bit signatures have high entropy and can be non-invasively detected for product authentication using ^{35}Cl nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) spectroscopy.
Highlights
Automatic recognition of unique characteristics of an object can provide a powerful solution to verify its authenticity and safety
A set of such tags is spatially distributed within the object during the additive manufacturing process to greatly increase the length, entropy, and unclonability of the signature, as described later
We have already automated most of these steps, enabling material biometrics to be directly integrated into industrial-scale additive manufacturing
Summary
Automatic recognition of unique characteristics of an object can provide a powerful solution to verify its authenticity and safety. We propose the novel concept of material biometrics, in which the intrinsic chemical properties of structural materials are used to generate unique identifiers for authenticating individual products For this purpose, the objects to be protected are modified via programmable additive manufacturing of built-in chemical “tags” that generate signatures depending on their chemical composition, quantity, and location. Some of the most commonly counterfeited products include consumer electronics, optical media, apparel/accessories, handbags/ wallets, footwear, watches/jewelry, pharmaceuticals/personal care, toys and computers/accessories. Most of these products are at least partially constructed out of various grades of plastic. Examples include authentication of pharmaceutical products through different types of packaging using nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) spectroscopy[10, 11] and spatially-offset Raman spectroscopy (SORS)[12]
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