Features, identity, tracing, and cryptography in product authentication

Product authentication is needed in anti-counterfeiting to distinguish genuine products from counterfeit ones. In spite of the current availability of sophisticated techniques and solution concepts for product authentication, secure authentication of different kinds of physical products remains an unsolved problem in practice. This paper presents a systematic overview of product authentication techniques. Our goal is to identify and analyze fundamental approaches for product authentication, investigate the available and emerging technologies and to evaluate them. The results are used to derive a set of decision variables, or constraints, that need to be taken into consideration when choosing which approach is most suitable to authenticate a given product.