Schematic showing the proposed process for generating and printing PUF images. Credit: Micromachines (2023). DOI: 10.3390/mi14091678
Receiving a fake designer handbag or imitation Wagyu beef might infuriate a Cyber Monday shopper, but a counterfeit respirator or fake pacemaker could put them in danger.
Emma Meno, a researcher at Virginia Tech, is developing a mobile application to allow shoppers to guarantee the legitimacy of their purchases. In a study published in Micromachines Earlier this fall, Meno and a team of researchers described their work to date.
“Counterfeiters place items on the market that resemble authorized medical devices or intercept a legitimate transaction,” said Meno, a research associate at the Virginia Tech National Security Institute. “A fake biodevice poses a huge health risk, and the growing number of people affected by it is worrying.”
In the days leading up to Cyber Monday last year, law enforcement shut down nearly 13,000 websites selling counterfeit luxury goods or pirated content. Although there are serious legal consequences for counterfeiting, they are only enforceable if someone is caught.
“Unfortunately, it’s easy for counterfeiters to evade detection: They can simply delete the website and create a new one,” said Meno, who is also a Commonwealth Cyber Initiative researcher supported by the program Innovation: Ideation to Commercialization, which seeks to advance research. from the laboratory to the market.
To counter counterfeiters, Meno and his team are developing a one-of-a-kind verification tool designed specifically for the end user. First, a seller stamps the item with a special label printed with biodegradable ink. When the purchase arrives, the buyer can use a mobile device to scan the stamp as if it were a QR code and receive confirmation that the item received matches what was sent.
Initially, Meno’s team is focusing on low-risk areas such as luxury products and working on applications in biomedical industries, but sellers in all of these areas are expected to benefit from this type of product aimed at end users.
“It’s not just about consumer peace of mind,” Meno said. “It’s also a concern for industries that lose money or suffer brand defamation every time someone buys a knockoff.”
Development of the app draws on a collaboration between researchers at Virginia Tech and colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University who developed and tested biodegradable ink that could be applied to something like Wagyu beef, the highly sought after costing over $200 per pound. The tags act as an unclonable “fingerprint” and the team is currently working on the best way to scan them so that they match another key in a database, before being automatically deleted.
“If a user scans a certain label and it doesn’t show up in the database, it’s probably counterfeit,” Meno said. “Someone in the middle may have intercepted it.”
The mobile app aims to be able to defend against this and other types of attacks as part of a broader effort to secure online transactions and protect businesses in cyberspace.
More information:
Sayantan Pradhan et al, Deep learning-based scanning of protein self-assembly to print physically unclonable biodegradable labels for device security, Micromachines (2023). DOI: 10.3390/mi14091678
Provided by Virginia Tech
Quote: Are your Cyber Monday purchases legit? There will be (is going to be) an app for that (November 24, 2023) retrieved November 25, 2023 from
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