The FINAT Sustainability Award has been held annually since 2014 to honour member initiatives that address environmental and social aspects of sustainability.

For many companies involved in authentication, the technologies they deploy are aimed at preventing cyber and online attacks. But, as this report demonstrates, research into authenticating physical goods still continues apace.

Acviss Technologies has developed a blockchain-based traceability application for the Coffee Board of India that gets around the issue of operating when there is no internet connection.

As a first step towards its goal of enhancing traceability systems in the food sector, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has released a final rule on ‘Requirements for Additional Traceability Records for Certain Foods’.

Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has announced that the social platform will launch a revamped account verification service at the beginning of December, including the allocation of different colour-coded ticks to verified individuals, government entities, and companies.

Most brand protection strategies, for obvious reasons, focus on preventing fakes and knockoffs ever reaching the hands of consumers. But what if, despite best efforts on the part of brand owners, a customer still has doubts about the authenticity of the handbag, watch or jewellery they have purchased?

Reconnaissance has previously reported on the role of brand protection in building and policing the metaverse. Now Meta, the company that is literally betting its future on the success of the metaverse as a virtual retail store, is taking steps to protect brands’ metaverse presence.

A partnership between p-Chip Corp, Kaasmerk Matec and the Consorzio del Parmigiano Reggiano has led to the creation of a new digital traceability tag for parmesan cheese.

The Vietnam E-commerce and Digital Economy Agency has put into operation a system of authenticating genuine goods via QRCode to encourage people and businesses to use solutions to develop products in eCommerce transactions.

Twitter users have been asking why online marketplace reseller StockX has removed the words ‘verified authentic’ from the green, coin-shaped tag it attaches to items sold on its platform.

Polyart Group, a supplier of film and paper substrates for the specialty label market, and EDGYN, a security solutions specialist, have announced a partnership for the Asia Pacific region.

Communications and security provider Toppan and Japan’s NICT have now announced the launch of PQC CARD®, which they claim is the world’s first smart card equipped with post-quantum cryptography.

In 2019, The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) launched a new anti-counterfeiting forum designed to encourage the development of cutting-edge technological solutions, including blockchain, to combat counterfeiting.

Like all progressive companies operating in the authentication and brand protection sectors, OpSec Security is committed to sustainability in its processes and products – as its new product line OpSec® Eco demonstrates.

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.

A team of scientists, from Heriot-Watt University and the University of Hong Kong have developed an optical metasurface to create colour-selective 3D polarisation structures.

Tausa-Pelcco, a Mexican company producing security documents and vehicle, road, and urban identification plates, has purchased an HP Indigo 6K Secure Press, the first in Latin America.

We all know what a challenge it is to get consumers to authenticate anything. With this in mind, Securikett has developed an anti-cloning security seal that brings the entertainment factor to product authentication.

Counterfeit and substandard medicines have existed for as long as medicines have existed. The OECD estimates the global trade in illicit pharmaceuticals to be worth at least $4.4 billion annually.

To accompany our feature this month on recent trends in near-field communication (NFC), we thought we’d take a snapshot of new authentication and identification programmes that are opting for NFC tags.

Dutch security print company Royal Joh Enschedé is teaming up with PROxID and Concordium blockchain to connect the world between security print products, NFTs and the metaverse.

A growing theme within the pages of Authentication & Brand News™ is the trend for technology providers of brand protection and authentication services to expand the usefulness of their offerings to include traceability of raw and recycled materials.

The Romanian wine sector has started using an authentication technology developed by Eluceda to authenticate the provenance of its regional wines and protect drinkers from potential counterfeits.

The dates have been announced for next year’s Optical & Digital Document Security conference (ODDS), which takes place 17-19 April 2023 in Prague.

The ability to link a physical object such as a label, stamp or direct mark into the digital space through devices such as a smartphone is a persuasive and growing field.

Giesecke+Devrient is probably better known for producing banknote paper and printing banknotes than it is for protecting brands. Having explored the brand protection market in the past, the company is now returning to protecting brands with its new SIGN® technology.

Swiss-based SICPA and New-Mexico nanotechnology company UbiQD have announced an expansion of their partnership to develop security inks based on the latter’s quantum dot technology.

Ennoventure Inc has recently received an award for the most secure anti-counterfeit technology 2022 at the EMEA Security Conference and Exhibition, held in Saudi Arabia.

Austria and US based mobile authentication technology company Authentic Vision has announced the US market release of its Meta Anchor™ technology that, it claims, secures the link between physical products and digital value, services and experiences.

Spectroscopy, the branch of science that measures and interprets the electromagnetic spectra resulting from the interaction between radiation and the sample, has found many uses in differentiating between real and fake banknotes, secure documents and pharmaceuticals.

The Holography Conference™ (THCO) will continue to be held online (after the success of the 2020 and 2021 events) and will take place this year from 5–6 December.

The Journal of Imaging Science & Technology (JIST) has recently featured articles from the 12th China Academic Conference on Printing and Packaging that took place in Beijing in November 2021.

SICPA has announced a strategic partnership with the Ecuadorian Seed Association (Ecuasem) to combat seed piracy and counterfeiting in the country.

Some brand owners don’t register their trademark and other intellectual property in China because they assume that a trademark registration in Europe or the US will provide some protection. However, a registration outside China does not provide any rights to use a mark within China, although recent changes to the legislation might offer greater protection.

The relaunch of Authentication & Brand News™ in January of this year came, to a large extent, as a response to a set of market trends triggered by the effects of COVID-19 which have been exacerbated by the conflict in Ukraine and widespread inflation.

Counterfeit liquor, which for years has been a problem for connoisseurs of fine wine, champagnes, and single-malt scotch, has started to become an issue for America’s fine brown liquor – bourbon.

In June, Amazon released its second Brand Protection Report, describing the results of its activities to ensure authenticity of goods sold in its store, and to fight bad actors.

Dubbed the ‘Sneaker Wars’, Nike’s ongoing lawsuit against online shoe reseller StockX will likely end up dictating how intellectual property law is applied to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), declared attorney and journalist Andrew Rossow, writing for nftnow.com.

What should have been a triumphant finale to the European football season descended into chaos as police fired tear gas and pepper spray at supporters in advance of the Champions League Final in Paris. What role did ticket fraud play in creating the chaotic scenes that were televised around the world as the kick off was delayed by more than half an hour?

Toppan has launched Illumigram™, a new security hologram in which three-dimensional images appear in response to strong light, such as a smartphone’s flashlight.

At the recent Tax Stamp & Traceability Forum™ in Malta, Dr Marietta Ulrich-Horn, CEO of Securikett, presented a solution for linking the company’s CODIKETT® unique identifying code on a tax stamp with a 2D barcode that had been laser-etched into a glass bottle.

Those of us who still believe overt security features validated with the naked eye should be the first ‘port of call’ for checking the authenticity of something, will be heartened by the HP Anti-Counterfeiting and Fraud programme.

MagVision, the magnetic innovation start-up, has announced a merger with Macon Management and Design (MMD), a UK-based engineering design company.

The importance of technology in protecting products, people and services against malicious attack has never been greater, as this cross-section of innovations shows.

The return of in-person conferences this year, after a hiatus of two or more years, has seen a slew of new features launched for banknote authentication.

The OECD has published a series of reports into illicit trade, the most recent of which is ‘eCommerce Challenges in Illicit Trade in Fakes’. The report is the first outcome of a special project on illicit trade between the Anti-Illicit Trade Expert Group (AITEG) and the public-private partnership (PPP), established under the OECD Task Force on Countering Illicit Trade (TF-CIT).

Chiplytics, a hardware security company building inspection technology that provides insights into the microelectronics supply chain, has announced its official launch from Scout Ventures.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an acceleration of what was already on the cards as far as brand owners are concerned: the need to change the way in which physical brand intelligence- gathering at point of sale is carried out.

The worldwide rising cost of food, due in equal measures to the war in the Ukraine, rising shipping costs and the increase in energy bills, is in danger of creating fertile ground for an increase in food fraud.

Without being able to hold or look at a physical object, or even capture the URL of a webpage, the challenges facing trademark infringement and brand protection are different to authentication in the real world (ITRW).

Pharmaceuticals are among the most heavily counterfeited goods on the planet and, according to the OECD and the EUIPO, are ‘attractive for counterfeiters given the high profit margins, low risks of detection and prosecution, weak penalties, and the ease with which consumers can be deceived into believing that the counterfeit products are genuine.’

Origyn, the Swiss foundation dedicated to identifying, authenticating and protecting the ownership of objects of value, has announced a partnership with WatchBox, a global leader in collectible luxury timepieces.

Anti-fraud product provider Outseer has released its latest findings on brand abuse, and it doesn’t make pleasant reading for online banking and eCommerce. According to the latest quarterly analysis from Outseer’s FraudAction team, brand impersonation scams continue to exploit the sharp rise in digital banking and eCommerce during the pandemic.

Crane Currency and Essentra Packaging have announced a strategic partnership to develop a range of next generation security features for the pharmaceutical and beauty packaging industry.

We have significant investment going into digital technologies, both from within our community and from the technology sector. However, to continue to add security to our physical documents we need to continue investment in ‘printed’ features to complement these for multilayer security.

Holography has helped to bring smartphone digital interaction in the brand protection and authentication space closer as the security technology discovers new outlets and innovative applications.

Conferences are back! And this includes the Tax Stamp & Traceability Forum™, taking place from 16-18 May 2022 in Malta. The Forum opens with a workshop on the pros and cons of using sophisticated digital printers for secure documents, including a review of digital security inks, feature design software, printing hardware and real-life applications.

Blockchain – the technology that underpins the digital currency bitcoin and is essentially a digital database of time-stamped records or transactions, which are unchangeable and decentralised – is becoming increasingly popular as a track and trace tool for physical supply chains and to guard against counterfeit goods.

The circular economy presents a $4.5 trillion business opportunity for companies that concentrate on rethinking products and services using principles based on durability, renewability, reuse, repair, replacement, upgrades, refurbishment, and reduced material use.

The Information Technology, Electronics and Communications Department of the Indian state of Telangana has implemented a pilot project for using RFID tags or QR code-enabled systems to track the inventory of gunny (burlap) sacks used for supplying food grain under the state Public Distribution System.

You may have noticed that, in the last few issues since the launch of the newly-branded Authentication & Brand News™, there has been something of an emphasis on sustainability. For companies in our sector (indeed, companies in any sector), sustainability, particularly in the environmental sense, is no longer a ‘nice to have’ – it’s a ‘must have’.

Flexible electronics developer PragmatIC Semiconductor has announced its involvement in leading an Innovate UK, Smart Sustainability Plastic Packaging business project that will make reusable plastic packaging systems a reality at scale.

Digital watermark specialist Digimarc was recently featured in a news clip from the BBC, the UK’s broadcaster, on how invisible watermarks could increase plastic recycling. The clip explored industry testing efforts in Europe and discussed packaging attributes that could be identified through the use of Digimarc’s technology, giving plastic packaging a so-called ‘voice’.

Meta’s top social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have become enormously successful e-commerce channels, and the counterfeiters have followed the money, says a new report by Ghostdata.

In the January issue of Authentication & Brand News™, we described how brand protection systems increasingly consist of an integrated physical/digital solution that offers multiple functions.

Intellectual property infringing products with a value of almost €2 billion were seized in the EU’s internal market and at external borders in 2020, according to an annual seizures report published at the end of last year.

Pharmaceuticals remain a real and potentially dangerous target for fraudsters, as these two new tamper-evident and anti-counterfeit developments testify.

With all of the media coverage surrounding the use of technology in the fight against online piracy and counterfeiting, we shouldn’t forget that trademark and copyright infringements were going on long before the invention of the world-wide-web.

In January, the European Commission and European Union Intellectual Property Office launched the new EU SME Fund, which offers vouchers for EU-based SMEs to help them protect their intellectual property rights.

Luxury and premium resale platforms and brands are improving their authentication processes in response to more sophisticated counterfeits, according to a report by Bella Webb of Vogue Business.

Identiv, Inc, a Nasdaq-listed provider of secure identification systems within the Internet of Things, has expanded its partnership with collectID in Switzerland, to provide a product authentication and consumer interaction solution on collectible football jerseys, via the use of embeddable near-field communication, life-of-garment tags.

TruTrace Technologies, a Canadian developer of a fully-integrated blockchain platform, has entered into a strategic partnership with Australian technology company Laava to drive product provenance and traceability.

Recommerce – the sale of pre-owned goods – is a nearly $40-billion-a-year industry and is expected to double soon. In an article on Bloomberg Law, attorneys from international law firm Perkins Coie examine the IP infringement questions facing resellers and brands in the resale marketplace.

Nanopixel, a subsidiary of the light science technologies group Lumenco, has announced the creation of MicroEdge™, a patented optical security feature that can be moulded directly into the surface of plastic products or packaging.

This month’s editorial makes a longitudinal study of the shifting geo-political forces that have formed the nature of brand protection. Another, more direct, hypothesis is that counterfeiting and other types of brand fraud are straightforward criminal activities with no respect for borders, treaties or the law.

Optical and materials security specialist KURZ has introduced a range of sustainable security labels as part of its TRUSTCONCEPT® brand portfolio. According to the company, the combination of its security features with individually combinable, environmentally friendly substrates means that customers can benefit from sustainable labels without forgoing its tried-and-tested security technology.

A group of academics at South Korea’s Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) have utilised natural silk fibres from domesticated silkworms to build an environmentally friendly digital security system that they say is ‘practically unbreachable’.

Foil and thin film technology company KURZ has been a pioneer in the use of diffractive optical anti-counterfeit features on banknotes since its earliest developments. Now, KURZ has made another step forward, with OVD Kinegram (OVDK), a member of the KURZ Group since 1999, in introducing its latest optical technology, KINEGRAM DYNAMIC®.

Nitches Inc, a designer and manufacturer of high-end clothing and accessories, has announced the launch of its patent-pending Owner Verification System (OVS) to prove the authenticity of its exclusive capsule collections created with celebrities and influencers.

The UPC (Universal Product Code) linear barcode has offered price lookup functionality for decades. However, the classic barcode is no longer keeping up with today’s growing demands for greater product information transparency, traceability, and authentication.

Last month’s relaunch of Authentication & Brand News™ comes, ‘at a time when it is more important than ever for brand owners to safeguard their intellectual property’. This is undoubtedly true, with the effects of COVID-19 making it easier than ever for counterfeiters and fraudsters to abuse intellectual and other corporate property.

The Austrian pilot project ‘Digi-Cycle’ – supported by the Austrian drinks industry to facilitate householding recycling of beverage containers through a rewards scheme – took place last August and September. Central to the pilot were tamper-evident labels and a system for generating limitless UIDs by Austrian security solutions provider Securikett.

Brand owners of mass-produced goods have for some time had access to a range of anti-counterfeit devices, such as holograms, security inks and nano-optic effects that provide clear visual signals of authenticity to consumers.

Fathom Optics has patented a software-based process using light field technology to bring 3D and motion graphics to security print without additional materials such as lenticular sheets or metallic foils.

Nanotech Security Corporation, now owned by Meta Materials Inc, is perhaps best known for designing, originating, recombining, and mass-producing nanotechnology-based films for securing documents of value against counterfeiting and tampering. But the Canada-based firm also offers a range of labelling solutions for advanced brand protection, to which it has now added a holographic version.

Each year, the authentication industry produces tens of millions of documents that require fast and reliable examination to confirm their authenticity. Doculus Lumus® is a mobile document checking device from charismaTec that was developed specifically for use in the often challenging environments of document checking for border management, law enforcement, security printing and banking.

The increasing trend towards consolidation in the track and trace industry continues with the announcement that Movilitas has been acquired by Engineering USA, bolstering the group’s industrial digitisation division.

Over the last few years, I have been following a number of technologies to see how these may work together to create eye-catching security features. One good example of these is the use of arrays of micro-lenses to produce caustic surfaces. This is the topic of this article.

De La Rue’s Authentication division recently presented interesting developments in digital security printing and product traceability.

Fluorescence – the phenomena where some materials emit radiation as a result of external stimuli – is usually a result, at least in the authentication industry, of visible light being emitted from incident radiation of a shorter wavelength.

Part of any anti-illicit product strategy should ideally include measures to reduce consumer demand for illicit products in the first place. While such measures could include imposing penalties on consumers for buying illicit goods, Taiwan has gone in the opposite direction with a scheme that rewards consumers for buying genuine, compliant goods.

Happy 2022 to all our readers – and welcome to the first issue of our new monthly publication – Authentication & Brand News™, which is replacing Authentication News®.