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.