Certifying Authenticity using RF Waves

A certificate of authenticity (COA) is an inexpensive physical object that has a random unique structure with high cost of near-exact reproduction. An additional requirement is that the uniqueness of COA’s random structure can be verified using an inexpensive device. We propose a design for objects that behave as COAs in the electromagnetic field. The objective is to complement RFIDs so that they are physically, not only digitally, unique and hard to replicate. By enabling this feature, we hope to create a super-tag whose information about the product can be read within a relative far-field, and also whose authenticity can be verified within its near-field with low probability of a false alarm. A peculiar feature of our system, not exhibited in previous proposals, is the difficulty of creating a COA instance that produces a given response. In this paper, we outline a proposal for the design of RFCOA instances, we present a prototype reader, and analyze the achieved system entropy.