If you want to ensure medicine is genuine or that Louis Vuitton handbag is real, two University of Rhode Island engineering professors have a low-cost solution.
Professors Tao Wei and Yan “Lindsay” Sun believe that strands of fiber optic cables smaller than a human hair could replace easy-to-forge documents, barcodes and RFID tags.
The cables – typically deployed to ferry data around the Internet – are composed of billions of strands of fiber, in turn made from billions more particles of glass. When light shines through the strands, each creates a different reflection pattern. Considered interference in the communications field, Wei and Sun realized this “interference” could hold a valuable purpose.
“The idea is this is super small, stable and cheap, and super secure because you cannot reproduce it,” Sun says.
A strand of fiber weighs less than a feather, costs fractions of a penny and easily attaches to the outside of a document or embeds in a luxury product. A scanner would record the strand’s pattern before the document or product was released. On the receiving end, a scanner would check for the same pattern.
And don’t worry; the researchers know how to secure the scanner as well. They’d simply attach a fiber optic strand to the scanner itself. An invalid pattern would indicate someone tampered with the scanner.
“At the molecular level there are small imperfections that are very random and unpredictable,” Wei says. “Even if you use the same instrument to fabricate two pieces of fiber, they will have dramatically different identities.”
The professors realized the power of that fact after sharing lunch. Wei, who doesn’t typically research security, started chatting about his work in fiber optic cables and mentioned that no two are alike. Sun, who studies security, was fascinated. When Wei later told her that the unique reflection patterns could be measured, Sun got to work applying the quirk of nature to security.
In just a few months, the two created a working prototype and penned a research paper. Now they want to slim down the scanner and refine the process.
“This is a really unique technology,” Wei says. “There are tons of applications just waiting to be discovered.”