Recent Advances in NFC and What This Means for Brand Protection

While near-field communication (NFC) has become the dominant technology for contactless payments, it has taken a backseat to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in terms of general adoption, with most people not even aware that their smartphones can have NFC built into them, says Alfons Futterer Managing Director of Hong Kong-based TrackMatriX Technologies.

However, this technology seems to be experiencing a resurgence as the world tries to create a more contactless society post-COVID.

NFC has some unique properties that make it indispensable, continues Mr Futterer, with one of these being that it is the only wireless technology that doesn’t need much power to run on. Only the reader or scanner needs to be powered up, while the NFC tag itself does not require power at all.

NFC is also quite easy to use as all it needs is proximity to another NFC-equipped device to transfer data.

Furthermore, NFC tags are small and flexible so can be incorporated into items that would not be able to accommodate Bluetooth and Wi-Fi receivers.

As such, NFC has become one of the most versatile wireless technologies currently in the market. It can be embedded in fabrics, paper, and virtually anything that can carry a sticker. Because of this versatility, organisations are free to let their creativity run free on how to use NFC to their advantage, including as a brand protection tool, said Mr Futterer.

Recent advances in NFC tagging provide brand owners with a highly secure tool to safeguard the authenticity and integrity of their products, advises Sylvia Kaiser-Kershaw, Senior Global Marketing Management, Connectivity & Security, NXP Semiconductors.

She describes how pharmaceutical companies, in particular, have been fighting drug counterfeiting by using visible, item- level serialisation codes, such as data matrix and QR codes. However, these coding systems are static and relatively easy to copy, which limits their ability to prevent counterfeiting.

In addition, these codes lack the functionality to operate as advanced ‘sensor platforms’, in that they cannot register external events, such as tampering or a change in fill level, said Ms Kaiser- Kershaw.

Regular NFC not enough

While NFC technology has the capability of filling the gap created by barcode limitations, there are, nevertheless, security concerns with regard to using regular NFC for brand protection.

For instance, if unauthorised individuals are able to gain access to data stored in an NFC tag, they could copy the data onto another tag in order to create a clone. This clone would then ostensibly perform in the same way as the original tag, thereby posing a significant security threat.

Furthermore, there is the risk of legitimate NFC tags being fraudulently removed from genuine products and attached to counterfeits.

To address these and other issues, NXP Semiconductors (which is actually the co-inventor of NFC technology, together with Sony and Inside Secure) released its NTAG® 22x DNA family of NFC integrated circuits, designed for use with consumer brands, and healthcare and smart-home products.

The NTAG 22x DNA family incorporates a unique identifier, together with scan counter, cryptographic security, and tamper-detection mechanisms, as well as battery-free, capacitive sensing to measure changes in ambient conditions, such as liquid fill levels – all on a single chip.

Christian Lackner, NXP’s Segment Manager for Smart Products Authentication and IoT Security, explained that with every new reading of the tag, the scan counter is increased by one and a unique, cryptographically secure authentication message, or signature, is generated. The message is composed of an encrypted combination of the tag’s unique identifier and the new counter number, and is returned as an entire URL to the reader.

The tags can be scanned by regular NFC readers, such as most modern smartphones, without the need for a special app. They can also be programmed with brand-specific landing pages that provide additional information about the product.

In addition, some tags offer a mutual authentication option with a cryptographic key, ensuring that only an authorised reader or server can access the tag’s data. The data is only released to an authenticated reader when the tag is confirmed, thereby protecting sensitive data from unauthorised access.

Two types of tamper-protection

Apart from cryptographic security, the tags offer two types of tamper-protection: conductive and capacitive.

Conductive tamper protection consists of a simple conductive loop built into a tagged label, which can be fixed to a closed bottle cap, for example. When the wire in that loop is broken, it triggers the writing of an ‘opened’ status into the chip’s memory. The next time a retailer or consumer interrogates the tag, the opened status will be displayed on their smartphone.

With capacitive tamper detection, the tag’s electronics are connected to a capacitive structure (ie. a structure that is able to collect and store energy in the form of an electric charge). If a tag has been tampered with, the capacitance of the structure changes, thereby triggering an ‘opened’ status.

While the conductive mode is often best suited for tamper-evident labels and seals (for which a simple open or closed status would be enough), the capacitive mode is designed for the integration of tags into physical products and presents a barrier to fraudulent reconstruction.

Early deployments

The NXP chips are commercially available and early deployments are focused on appliances and healthcare products, along with luxury-brand drinks, such as wine and spirits, which require intelligent closures.

The wine market, for example, has become flooded with re-corked and outright fake bottles of wine worth tens of thousands of dollars. What makes this situation particularly sinister is that some buyers don’t even know they have bought fake wine, even after tasting it.

NFC is one of the primary technologies that wine makers tap into to counterfeit-proof their bottles. From cork stoppers to tamper tags, these seemingly mundane items that usually come with a bottle of wine can be equipped with NFC sensors that digitally indicate whether a bottle has already been opened, even if fraudsters manage to physically restore the tags and corks to their original unopened state.

With the number of NFC-enabled phones forecast to reach almost 4 billion by the end of 2023, said Mr Lackner, half the world’s population could soon have an NFC reader in hand. With these tags, ‘you don’t need to install an app on your phone to access the data. The system takes the phone directly to the link. I personally find this is breaking down a big barrier’.