Product Authentication Using QR Codes: A Mobile Application to Combat Counterfeiting

Abstract

Counterfeiting is one of the biggest challenges for the authenticity of genuine products. An estimated average of 8–9 % trade consists of counterfeit goods that create a loss of revenue. To combat this situation, the product manufacturers use hologram and barcodes. The issue of genuine product remains the primary challenge in the market. With emerging trends in mobile and wireless technology, Quick Response (QR) codes provide a robust technique to fight the practice of counterfeiting the products. Apart from being used extensively in marketing and information transfer applications, the QR codes and encrypted QR codes are primarily used in security and privacy applications. Many web applications use QR codes for secure login where the user need not remember his/her login ID and password. The encrypted unique user ID is verified at the server using QR codes. Our proposed approach uses QR codes based on 2-dimensional codes (such as 19 Aztec, Data Matrix, etc.) to authenticate the product. This approach simplifies the size of QR code, and minimizes the complexity of encoding and decoding in QR code.