Anti-counterfeiting with a Random Pattern

Abstract

Anti-counterfeiting is a global problem. Brand owners turn to advanced anti-counterfeiting techniques to seek for a good technical solution. An anti-counterfeiting system normally binds a product with a digital identifier, which per se is encoded by a physical identifier. The physical identifier then is attached with the product. If the physical identifier is cloneable or reusable, the counterfeit products could easily cheat the anti-counterfeiting system. In this paper, we propose an anti-counterfeiting system applying physical uncloneable function (PUF) as the physical identifier. We use a random pattern formed by scattering particles as PUF and we encode the digital identifier in the random pattern. The randomness makes the pattern utmost difficult to be physically cloned. The contributions of this paper are two-fold: (1) a method to encode and decode the digital identifier in the random pattern is proposed, and (2) a user-friendly anti-counterfeiting system using PUF is built.