A thousand apologies for "Baraba"...although it is kind of a cool name. I guess in Hebrew that would mean something close to Son of aba which is close to abba which means Father in a very endearing way.
Your point is the sticking point in any security environment. If you can appeal to the greed response in an unscrupulous character placed in a critical position in a security network, your security is compromised. In that event, the employee himself could be a counterfeit with the only intention for hiring on was to be able to get the critical information for his REAL employer. OOOOOOOOOOOOO7 intrigue! I am trying to leave plenty of room here for healthy paranoia.
Wow. There goes the path of least resistance for counterfeiters. I'm sure a lot of these guys can out-engineer the best of security tags, but I'm thinking about ROI. How much money would you have to make to make it worthwhile? Pulling parts off a board is one thing, but dodging RFID and plant DNA takes it to another level. I'm wondering if there is a cadre of tecchies out there that develop this stuff and then sell or license it to counterfeiters? Do counterfeiters have R&D budgets? Fascinating stuff...
Very Interesting. I took away these things from the article: 1) A Sticker on a Container of parts is not a solution; 2) Solution must be automated and also identify counterfeits already in the inventory.
DNA technology points out that the verification must be inherent to the component in question. With the stakes as high as it is, relying on Chain of custody is not just a huge mistake, but have likely already pervaded Global component inventories with counterfeits. People are corruptible.
If I were a counterfeiter, rather than breach a secure system, I'd pay people to vouch counterfeit products into secondary or tertiary supply chains upstream that would drift into primary markets. Keep trying until you find one that taps into your target market.
A better solution is Quality Control/Testing. If you come up with a testing standard, you can create devices that automaticxally puts a component through a round of tests with random inputs that knows what outputs to expect. If a component's features return the correct answer to the questions, within specced performance, then you can consider the component non-counterfeit.
This device(s) should also vouch components already in the industry so serves a dual purpose. And counterfeiting provides a company with cost justifications for purchasing equipment, hiring Component QA professionals, and implementing robust procedures.
If I were a well-funded Chinese Company or North Korean operative with adequate resources, I could pay more to get the top-secret technologies and product a counterfeit product of equal quality that will perform reliably, but this is a far less attractive and profitable endeavor. I'd switch to an easier target and market.
Elctrnx_lyf,
Your question is very significant. It is probably the most asked question from a standpoint of universal application deployment. Right now I need to ask that question of some key researchers. If ceramics and organic materials can be included then there has to be some other kind of PUF not based upon silicon gate technology. Polymers might be infused with carbon nanotubes for this purpose, but let me look into this as the implications for a positive response are tremendous. Standby.
Douglas, that's really a nice wrteup. Fun to read with good introduction on puf. Looking forward to know more. But is it really possible to put these into passives and small active components.
Anandvy,
Actually, they are not subject to these stresses which makes them more robust. In accelerated stress screenings, it was determined that even the aging of the silicon did not impact the integrity of the PUF. That is why this is a viable security. If you are interested in the lab reports, email me and I will forward them to you. The test simulated 20 years over a couple of months. It is called HALT and HASS testing. Highly Accelerated Life Testing for HALT.
The marker is intrinsic in the silicon. And the marker disappears if I remove the power from the part. This is going to slow my business down for sure.
@Douglas, I think PUF's now only slow down the business but they have reliability issue as well because they are subject to environmental variations such as temperature, supply voltage and which can affect their performance.
Douglas – Thanks! The authors of the report you referred to (the EU-funded BRIDGE program) do a pretty good job of laying things out, and I don't see anything to disagree with. The 2 key takeaways regarding cloned tags, in my opinion:
1.Tags (the chips, specifically) cannot currently be cloned, at least in the form of normal tags placed on any large volume of items. However, it is possible – and will likely be financially rewarding – for bad guys to, at some point, produce "blank" chips that can be programmed as clones. Once that happens, the clones will be detectable by firms which maintain good databases and communications infrastructures, but perhaps not quickly enough to prevent significant losses.
2.Although tags cannot be cloned yet, a tag can be impersonated by a relatively simple battery-powered PC board-based solution. This is the 10-euro fake that you mentioned in your original post. Such a tag generally won't look like a normal RFID tag, but in some cases it can be hidden or possibly disguised as a large ruggedized tag. This is potentially an immediate threat for some high-value items.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the above scenarios to have an impact.
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Join EBN contributor Jennifer Baljko on Thursday August 23, 2012, at 11:00 a.m. EST for a live chat on how electronic manufacturers in Thailand have shored up their supply chain to reduce the impact of future natural disasters.
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