The German economy suffers over 50 billion euros in losses due to product and brand piracy every year. The EU market surveillance authorities categorized 97 percent of the counterfeits recorded as goods with serious risks. Production and logistics companies are powerless against counterfeiting: Worldwide, there is no cross-industry and cross-border solution approach for verifying product identities. "There is also no globally recognized procedure that companies can use to identify counterfeit products without having to disclose information on supply chains and volumes. The SPOQ project is now closing this gap," explains Stefanie Hildebrandt, Project Manager Technology and Innovation at the VDE.

On behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection (BMWK), the technology organization is now working with partners from industry and science to develop a methodology for counterfeit-proof product marking on original products to verify the unique identity, which will then be put into practice as a prototype on the manufacturer and end user side. The fight against counterfeiting is thus declared.

Methodology for forgery-proof product identity

As part of the funded project "Standardized secure product verification to protect originality and quality" (SPOQ), the project partners AIM, KOBIL, PAV Card, University of Würzburg and Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, under the leadership of the VDE, are developing a standardized and thus globally applicable procedure that not only enables a forgery-proof product identity, but also allows manufacturers to retain their data sovereignty. "Our aim is for them to manage the identification of their products themselves in decentralized databases, for example as part of a blockchain infrastructure," continues Hildebrandt. To do this, manufacturers store the identity of their product with characteristic physical features that are difficult to forge in a database. Within a fixed period of time, the distributor or end customer can then retrieve the identity of the product and determine its authenticity by comparing it with the characteristics.

Check identity via smartphone

At the same time, the project partners are testing suitable technologies for linking a physical product with its digital identity and developing concepts for the secure handling of product and tracking data. In order to be prepared for complicated counterfeiting scenarios, they are combining several methods and indicators to verify the authenticity of a product. As part of a proof-of-concept of the standardized approach, the prototypical development and provision of toolkits for manufacturers, intermediaries and end customers, which are linked to decentralized databases, is then carried out. Here, the experts rely on hardware that is already in widespread use, such as common smartphones as a platform, which are also equipped with hardware add-ons for specific applications or mobile readers for barcodes and similar devices commonly used in retail and logistics.

The SPOQ project and the project partners

The SPOQ project aims to record, process, standardize and implement secure product verification and is being carried out under the leadership of the VDE in cooperation with the following partners:

• AIM-D e.V. (Industrieverband Automatische Identifikation, Datenerfassung und Mobile Kommunikation e.V.)
• University of Würzburg, LS Informatik II, Secure Software Systems
• Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Information Technology, ESM Institute
• KOBIL, Security Technologies
• PAV Card, RFID solutions and IT services

The project is part of the technology funding program "WIPANO - Knowledge and Technology Transfer through Patents and Standards" of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate (BMWK). As part of the SPOQ project, the VDE also has the task of creating a VDE SPEC, which should subsequently lead to an international standard or family of standards.