The project PHOTAG is financed by Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) within the action" Missione 4 Istruzione e ricerca – Componente 2 “Dalla ricerca all’impresa” Investimento 1.1 Fondo per il Programma Nazionale di Ricerca e Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN)” del PNRR – Finanziato dall’Unione Europea – NextGenerationEU".
PROJECT OVERVIEW
The rise of counterfeiting requires new materials and technologies for more secure anti-counterfeiting identification labels to prevent and limit social and economic damage. At present, current technologies (electronic, chemical/physical, mechanical, visual marking, to name a few) only partially meet the requirements for secure authentication, anti-tampering, traceability, and tracking of goods along the supply chain.
PHOTAG aims to develop a low-cost, multi-level security and easy-to-use anti-counterfeiting label for optical encoding of metadata of goods.
The goal of the project is to realize photonic QR codes for product identification by patterning photo-polymerizable liquid crystalline (LC) materials using different manufacturing techniques. This will result in optical labels encoding the product history and characteristics exploiting tags with different sizes, scalability and information density capabilities.
The random defects of the photonic label will serve as unclonable features that, through optical interrogation protocols based on a challenge-response pair scheme, will uniquely authenticate the product.
PHOTAG ESSENZIALS
PHOTAG ESSENZIALS
Development of two types of photonic tags:
Colored QR code photonic tags
QR code holograms by 3D diffractive optical elements
Multi-step encoding and authentication of the goods history along the supply chain
PHOTONIC TAGS
Colored QR code photonic tags
2D+1 (color information) encoding into stabilized cholesteric liquid crystals by UV lithography
Qr code holograms by 3D diffractive optical elements
3D optical encoding into diffractive optical elements made by polymer stabilized liquid crystals
MULTI-STEP ENCODING AND AUTHENTICATION
Optical QR code encoding and authentication will be tested in a multi-step process for secure and certified reading and encoding of information at nodes in a production chain, at the end of which the end consumer will be able to link to product metadata stored in a secure database through a simple optical reading of the QR code.
These optical metadata encoders, combined with Physical Unclonable Function (PUFs), promise to fulfill all functions of identification, authentication, traceability, as well as anti-tampering for anti-counterfeiting of goods.
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