INSIDE Secure uses NFC chip security to catch out fake product peddlers

INSIDE Secure uses NFC chip security to catch out fake product peddlers

INSIDE Secure has announced its VaultIC150 NFC chip security solution that is designed to be embedded in high ticket consumer products. An expected use of NFC has always been to be enable manufacturers to authenticate their genuine products to retailers and consumers, and to give consumers the power to tell a cloned product from an original. We have seen solutions hit the market already, including the NFC reactive imprinted electronic labels from PragmatIC Printing, that are designed to act as authentication in high ticket items. However, we haven’t seen a mass production NFC chip product that can be embedded within products cost effectively until now.

“Counterfeiting and cloning are taking a tremendous toll on makers of popular high-end brands, not only in lost revenues, but also in jobs lost and company reputation,” said Christian Fleutelot, General Manager of VaultIC Secure Microcontroller Solutions Business Unit at INSIDE Secure. “The VaultIC150 provides these manufacturers with a simple, single-chip solution that provides banking-level security to protect their brands at an attractive price point.”

The idea is that the VaultIC150 NFC chip can be embedded inside of product so it is not visible. The benefit to manufacturers is that it would destroy the product if anyone attempted to remove the NFC chip from the product.

With more and more NFC phones coming to market and an expected saturation within the next few years. INSIDE Secure is betting on the fact that most consumers will be able to verify authenticity of a product themselves by simply waving their handsets over the NFC chip inside hight ticket items. Tags and NFC chip ICs require no power because they are powered by the RF field that emanates from an NFC reading device which makes batteries a non-issue.

This is likely to be attractive to manufacturers and retailers as it allows authentication to be cost effective and frictionless to implement. However, an NFC based authentication product is only as good as the security features it enables and INSIDE Secure’s VaultIC150 has security features galore.

Secuity Authentication using INSIDE Secure’s VaultIC150 NFC chip solution for high-end consumer goods

If a tag or NFC chip can be rewritten or duplicated in consumer products, it is useless. That fact didn’t escape INSIDE Secure as they developed the VaultIC150 NFC chip security solution. The new VaultIC150 builds upon the firms VaultIC100 product line and uses elliptic-curve mutual authentication. INSIDE says that this level of security corresponds to banking level security. In fact, the firm says that the VaultIC150 meets the stringent constraints of the EAL4+ and FIPS 140-2 L3 certification.

“On the chip are voltage, frequency, and temperature detectors, illegal code execution prevention, tampering monitors and protection against side-channel attacks and probing. The chips can detect tampering attempts and destroy sensitive data on such events, thus avoiding data confidentiality being compromised.”

Okay, so we get the idea that it can be embedded and it is very secure, but how would consumers be able to use the NFC chip? INSIDE provides manufacturers who use the VaultIC150 NFC chip system are also provided with apps for users NFC phones so that consumers can interact with products. INSIDE says that the software can be customized by high-end product manufacturers to represent their branding and theming.

From a consumer’s perspective they can authenticate that a product is genuine and can even check local retailers’ stock levels to find out where they can purchase the item if the retail vendor has a product-locator database. INSIDE has even more options for security which you can find out more about over at their site. As far as availability the firm says that the NFC chip samples are available now, but they don’t reveal pricing, which is no doubt contingent on order levels and other factors, like transportation.

The retail and manufacturing community now has a way to authenticate their products to consumers, and from our perspective, warranty and loyalty applications could also be dealt out from the included add to help make ROI for manufacturers rather than simply adding cost for protection. A goal for the humble NFC chip and NFC tag has always been to infiltrate every product we use for information, security and interaction from a marketing perspective.

The INSIDE Secure VaultIC150 appears to be making the first step in to bringing down pricing on this technology and takes NFC one step further towards becoming truly ubiquitous outside of payments. If you want to learn more about INSIDE Secure’s VaultIC150 NFC chip security solution, head over to their site by clicking this link.