Tackling Counterfeiting With RFID

Counterfeiting is estimated to be a $450 billion industry worldwide. The need to protect product and brand integrity is set to become the new value proposition for RFID.

Controlling the legitimacy and the brand integrity of a product in the supply chain has been a struggle for manufacturers. However, a new twist on using radio frequency identification (RFID) may provide an answer.

Smart electronic security markers, based on RFID technology, are making an impact with item-level security and laying the ground work for this kind of protection in future applications.

RFID tags embedded at the product item-level make it easier to guarantee authenticity and represent an increasingly important value proposition for RFID by protecting product and brand integrity.

RFID fights counterfeiting with an embedded electronic security marker, identifying a product or brand, that is automatically read as it passes through the supply chain either individually or as a group inside a shipping case.

Over the past ten years, Tensor have been at the forfront of implementing RFID smart cards within our visitor monitoring systems. By using RFID, each smart card has an electronic security marker embedded into it, which is encoded with a unique data set that by itself or in conjunction with a network, can distinguish the product as genuine.

This marker is unique to the individual product and cannot be easily altered, providing an enhanced level of security. Smart electronic security markers based on RFID technology make it easier to authenticate a product as genuine, compared with current anti-counterfeit methods that require human intervention.

While there are a number of measures that can be taken to protect brand integrity in the supply chain for pharmaceuticals and other high-value items, RFID offers the most potential of any technology on the market today.

There is a range of increasingly secure methods of using RFID to prevent different types of counterfeiting, using both an off-network and on-network approach to enable "anywhere, anytime" authentication of tag data and thus identifying the product as legitimate.

RFID has always been about providing consumer convenience, protection and security in applications as diverse as automobiles, toll tags and retail payment. Now, RFID authentication of individual items can protect both consumers and companies alike against counterfeit goods.