Researchers at MIT have developed a highly advanced anti-tampering ID tag that is significantly smaller and cheaper than traditional Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. It leverages the power of terahertz waves to improve upon conventional security tools and offers an innovative solution to safeguard items from counterfeit.
Traditional security tags, much like this one, use radio waves to authenticate the validity of items. However, these radio frequency tags are larger and more expensive. Furthermore, they have a known security vulnerability; it’s possible for counterfeiters to remove the tag from a genuine item and affix it to a counterfeit item, breaching the authentication system.
The new tag developed by MIT researchers manipulates terahertz waves to tackle the tampering problem. Terahertz waves are smaller and have higher frequencies than radio waves. Embedded irremovable microscopic metal particles in the glue used to stick the tag to items allows these waves to identify the specific pattern formed by the particles on the item’s surface. Each unique glue pattern, comparable to a fingerprint, can be used to verify the item, rendering the tag useless if detached from the original item and reattached elsewhere.
The tag is an extremely cheap and small device, measuring around 4 square millimeters. It has a light-powered anti-tampering feature and uses a machine-learning model for added security to detect similar glue pattern fingerprints with over 99 percent accuracy.
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the authentication process makes this system more robust. This machine-learning model, trained on a plethora of glue patterns, quickly identifies and verifies the tags with a high degree of accuracy, thus reducing the time and resources required for manual validation.
Due to the tag’s size and production cost, it could be implemented on a monumental scale across entire supply chains — for instance, in authenticating medical devices too small for regular RFIDs.
However, the system does have limitations. For instance, the sensor can only be around 4 centimeters away from the tag for accurate readings. The terahertz waves also suffer from high transmission losses, and the angle between the sensor and the tag should be less than 10 degrees, or the signal will degrade. The research team is actively working on addressing these limitations in their future work.
Their goal is to demonstrate the potential of terahertz waves in other applications such as ID, security, and authentication, and inspire other researchers to overcome the technical hurdles presented by this spectrum. This research is supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies.
