Hyperlabel and Digital Encryption

Manufacturers and regulators are increasingly recognizing that supply chains are insecure and that consumers must be given the means to authenticate the products they purchase. Hyperlabel meets the need for secure and consumer-verifiable product pedigrees by affordably placing product authentication in the hands of consumers and supply chain participants.

Low cost Hyperlabel scanners will be incorporated into a wide range of consumer devices such as mobile phones, encouraging consumers to authenticate product items whenever they doubt their provenance or simply desire assurance.

Authentication is facilitated through the use of secure digital signatures. Digital signatures rely on well accepted public-key encryption infrastructure and its hierarchy of trust. Digital signatures are already widely used to make online financial transactions secure. Hyperlabel tags encode a pair of digital signatures, replicated over the entire surface of a tagged product package or label.

The first digital signature is a randomized signature which is verified via a secure database lookup, keyed by the product item's EPC. The second signature is a public-key signature which is verified using the published public key associated with the product line (or other product class).

The randomized signature can be recovered via a single click of the reader on the product surface, but must be verified via an online access to a secure server. The public-key signature must be recovered via a swipe of the reader across the product surface, but can be verified offline using a previously-obtained certificate associated with the product line.

The use of digital signatures prevents a counterfeiter from producing valid tags for novel (un-seen) product items, so the counterfeiter can, at best, only duplicate the tags of known product items. Any duplicates are detected and invalidated via the track & trace infrastructure.

The Hyperlabel specification supports a 96-bit EPC, a 36-bit randomized signature, and an extensible set of public-key signature schemes including DSA and RSA. Different products and applications may utilize different signature schemes. The length of the public-key signature, and the length of a click or swipe to recover it, depends on the signature scheme used and the desired level of security.

For more detailed information on these issues, see our Authentication White Paper.