Unclonable RFIDs: Better Authentication, Same Price

In today’s day and time, when every living and non-living thing on earth can be emulated, Silicon Valley-based Verayo has come up with RFID chips, which are unclonable. The company is bringing this chip to India in partnership with RFID vendor Bartronics.

The unclonable RFID chip stems from a new technology called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) invented at MIT (Boston). A type of silicon biometrics technology, when PUF circuits are integrated into semiconductor chips such as RFIDs, they extract chip unique characteristics or electronic fingerprints for authentication and anti-cloning.

Vivek Khandelwal, vice president-Marketing and Business Development, Verayo, said, “Any basic RFID chip simply has a unique number, which can be easily emulated by ghost devices or even cloned. Though advanced cryptography-based RFIDs make it difficult to emulate, however, those come at a significantly higher price point. Whereas Verayo’s RFID chip has a unique electronic fingerprint that cannot be copied from one chip to another, even by a chip manufacturer and this comes at a similar price point as basic RFIDs.”

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“The basic unclonable RFID chips will first be used by Bartronics in its RFID tags and solutions revolving around anti-counterfeiting applications will be developed. These applications have a ready market in India especially in the Pharmaceutical and government (currency, passport etc) sectors,” said Sudhir Rao, managing director, Bartronics India.

The new unclonable RFIDs are targeted at companies looking for low-cost authentication. Sectors such as Transport, Secure ID Card, Access Control, Branding, Ticketing, Product Authentication (pharmaceuticals) and Payment Cards are most amenable for fully secure RFID applications.

“A mass transit agency can get a more secure RFID chip for mass transit tickets and passes, instead of less secure basic RFIDs or more expensive crypto RFIDs. A consumer product company looking at authenticating products can use this solution as a low cost, anti-counterfeiting solution,” said Khandelwal.

Though recession has hit every single industry, it has also presented significant opportunities to vendors in disguise. Businesses are now more open then ever to adopting new technologies that offer better performance at lesser price points.