The natural fingerprint

A new technology has been developed that could revolutionise the secure packaging and authentication market in the pharmaceutical industry, thereby protecting documents and brand identity.

The Laser Surface Authentication (LSA) technology, invented by Russell Cowburn, Professor of Nanotechnology, and his team in the Blackett Physics Laboratory of Imperial College London, recognises the inherent ‘fingerprint’ within all materials such as paper, plastic, metals and ceramics. A unique fingerprint, more accurate than DNA, can be formed by the differentiation of the tiny microscopic surface imperfections in the packaging, and because of this unique identity, it can be used to authenticate genuine pharmaceutical products and quickly identify counterfeit products in the field.

All non-reflective surfaces have naturally occurring imperfections, inherent and unique to each surface. When a focused laser beam is scattered over the surface of a material, the scanner records the reflections of the light and creates a unique identity code. This code, like an RFID tag or bar code, can be stored in a database along with other information such as date, time of manufacture, batch size and destination of the product. ‘The beauty is that there is no need to modify the item being protected in any way with tags, chips, or inks,’ says Cowburn. ‘It’s as if documents and packaging have their own unique DNA.’

A new company, Ingenia Technology, based in London, UK, was formed to commercialise LSA and further develop the technology with Cowburn and his team, and market the technology worldwide. LSA has been under development for over three years and is now mature enough for commercial roll-out. A number of pilot projects on branded products including pharmaceutical packaging are already underway, with positive results, and production roll-out of the technology is anticipated with some major brand owners in the coming months.

Cost-effective security

The LSA system offers a high level of security against counterfeiting compared with other technologies and at a fraction of the cost. Every surface on every pharmaceutical blister pack, box, carton or plastic bottle is microscopically different. The LSA system uses a laser to read the surface’s naturally occurring fingerprint and then stores the information securely on a database. The document or object can be checked by performing a further simple scan that will automatically check against the existing stored fingerprint data and verify its authenticity.

The accuracy of the measurement is often greater than that of DNA with a false positive chance of less than one in ten to the power of 100+. Even though packaging can be damaged from age, crumpling, writing and spilling of fluids, the system will still recognise them as the original.

The major advantage of LSA is that not only is it secure, it is also relatively inexpensive compared with any other technology. Because no marker, hologram, ink or tag is being added to the packaging, then there is no additional cost to the packaging. The LSA fingerprint is read by a fixed laser sitting alongside the pharmaceutical production line and scans the boxes, cartons, plastic bottles or blister packs as they run along the line. LSA has been successfully tested on a number of production lines at speeds of up to 2m/s, but speeds of up to 4m/s are possible. There is no impact to existing production manufacturing lines and no additional cost to the packaging.

The LSA fingerprints can be stored in a database and associated with other critical data such as product name, batch, date of manufacture, destination market. A low-cost, hand-held laser scanner in the field can then be used to authenticate the product by scanning the same general area as the original scan, and within 4 to 5 seconds can authenticate the product as genuine or ‘unknown’ by interrogating the database from anywhere in the world.

The size of the LSA fingerprint is also relatively small. Depending on the size of the scanned area, the typical fingerprint takes up about 150–750 bytes of memory. That means that the average PC could store about 300 million signatures. Using low-cost state-of-the-art parallel server technology, this means that billions of signatures could be stored for a given customer, with fast authentication at a fraction of the cost of comparative technologies.

Embedding experiment

One concept being explored in the packaging and secure document industry by Ingenia Technology is to embed the LSA signature within a two-dimensional Datamatrix code on the product or document. This would overcome the problem faced by the bar code industry, in that bar codes by themselves are not secure and can be easily copied using photocopy machines.

It is impossible to tell an original bar code from a copy. By embedding the LSA signature of the item within the Datamatrix code on the packaging, the item would have an intrinsic security in that only the genuine product would have the LSA fingerprint to match the Datamatrix code.

Any counterfeit product could easily copy the Datamatrix code, but the LSA fingerprint of the fake product would not match the fingerprint in the Datamatrix code. This technique could be of interest to applications where access to a database is difficult or impractical, and on-the-spot verification is required without access to external communications networks.

Company profile

Ingenia Technology was founded in 2003 and is based in London, UK. For more information, visit: www.ingeniatechnology.com.

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