Creating nanoscale patterns for secure Id

Creating a secure identification for the many products being sold remains a challenge. You want to have a secure identity, impossibile to duplicate, and you also want to have it cheap so that it can really be used. 
There is basically nothing that cannot be reproduced, but the point is the cost of reproduction. If it would cost much more to duplicate an identity than the value of the product itself there wouldn’t be any incentive in doing that.
This is the result achieved by a group of researchers in South Korea.
They have found a way to scatter some twenty silver nano rods coated by a fluorescent dyes and freeze their position by embedding them in a plastic sheet. This creates a unique pattern that is practically impossibile to reproduce.
Each nanowire has a diameter of about 70nm and a length between 10 and 50 µm. They scatter in a random way that is impossibile to duplicate (at least within reasonable cost – IBM has shown several years ago a way to push a single atom into a specific position but that is a feat requiring an extremely complex apparatus and a long time….).
The fluorescent dyes make the pattern visible optically, through an optical microscope but potentially also through a smart phone camera, and this pattern can be compared with the original one to ensure that it is not counterfeited. 
Interestingly the authentication process can be automated in such a way that any given pattern is given a unique identity (a number) so that one does not need to store the image and compare the image but just a number and compare it with the number calculated by the analyses of the pattern detected by the terminal once observing the image.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.