Patent Application: US-47748606-A

Abstract:
the present invention is a method and apparatus for protection of products and packaging against counterfeiting using dedicated authentication protocol coupled with portable devices . it is based on the product identification information , i . e ., pin , generated by the product manufacturer , stored in the product database and added to product or packaging in an open and / or a hidden form . the open part is directly available to the consumer before buying , opening or consuming the product or package or damaging its integrity while the hidden part is only revealed after these operations . the hidden information can also be disappearing after a predefined interval of time or number of trials or usages . both parts are communicated to the authentication server in a predefined order to verify the product or package authenticity . the presence , absence , or multiple requests for the same product pin , confirm or reject product authenticity or detect attempt at attacking the system or at using counterfeited products .

Description:
23 — the invention proposes a novel brand protection protocol based on portable devices that might be applied to various kinds of goods and products and targets verification of their authenticity . the authentication verification is performed based on the two kinds of secure information , two parts of a pin , uniquely identifying the product , i . e ., open and hidden parts of pin stored on the product surface , packaging , label etc . and reproduced either by analog or digital printing , laser engraving or audio reproduction devices using audio modulation of speech , vibro , piezoelectric sounds or any other suitable principles of sound generation . the hidden part of the code might be encoded and encrypted in order to enhance the security of the proposed protocol . accordingly to the structure of the authentication information , the authenticity verification undergoes two main stages referred to as inside shopping area verification and outside shopping area verification . at the inside shopping area verification stage the open part of the security code is directly retrieved from a storage location by any input means available on the portable device ( keyboard , microphone , video camera , etc .) and will be compared on the authentication server to the corresponding data stored in the database . there are three kinds of databases involved in the protocol , a database of open parts of secure codes , a database of hidden parts of secure codes and a database of user requests . the databases of secure information have such a structure that every field in a database of the open secure codes has a unique correspondent in the database of hidden secure pins and vice - versa . 24 — depending on the particular implementation of the protocol , three scenarios of authenticity verification are possible ( fig1 - 3 ). the system architecture presented in fig1 is referred to as a local one that can be used for off - line verification . the system architecture presented in fig2 is referred to as a remote one that can be used for on - line verification . the system presented in fig3 is called the hybrid one and combines elements of the previous two systems . in the case of local architecture , when all databases as well as the authentication server are installed on a user portable device ( fig1 ), the corresponding data streams from both open and hidden secure pins are compared on the portable device itself . the product ( item 1 ) contains the uniquely assigned identification information ( 2 ) that is located on its surface , packaging , attached label or certificate . the identification information in the from of pin ( 2 ) is captured by standard acquisition ( digital camera , microphone ) or input ( keyboard ) means integrated into the portable device ( 3 ) processed , verified and displayed on the same portable device . other modifications of the authentication verification protocol configurations correspond to the setups when both the required computations ( decoding , decryption ), the databases and the authentication server are remote ( fig2 ) or while decoding / decryption is performed on the portable device and the databases and the authentication server are remote ones ( fig3 ). 25 — in the general case , the authentication procedure can be considered according to the protocol presented in fig4 where both restricted shopping area verification based on the open part of the pin ( 2 a ) and public verification based on the hidden part of the pin ( 2 b ) are performed . depending on this two - stage verification results , the product authenticity is confirmed or rejected as well as the databases ( 5 a ) and ( 5 b ) are modified accordingly . in particular , the first authentication verification stage is performed inside the restricted area and the database of user requests ( 5 b ) is updated , i . e ., a new field containing the portable device identification number is created . the corresponding update is performed in the database of open secure pins ( 5 a ) linking the corresponding product with the portable device identification information . in case the product is passing the second secure authentication stage performed outside the shopping area based on the hidden encoded / encrypted part of the authentication information ( 2 b ), the final decision is delivered to the consumer via the portable device ( 3 ). the decision generated by the authentication server besides the final confirmation or rejection of the product authenticity contains the update of the consumer account information stored in the database of user requests . according to the first part of the generated information , the product will be further considered as a sold out or not authentic , which will lead to the corresponding modification of the databases . in order to finally confirm the authenticity of the purchased item , the following requirements should be satisfied . first , the hidden part of the secure code located on the product , packaging or label in digital or analogue form , should coincide with the information stored in the database of hidden codes . moreover , the pair of open / hidden secure codes retrieved from the product should have a correspondence to a linked field pair stored in the databases of open and hidden pins . second , both requests received during inside / outside shopping area verifications , should be delivered from a unique portable device . in the case when both requirements are satisfied , the authentication server generates the corresponding reply to be delivered to the consumer in a visual or analogue form that besides the authenticity confirmation contains the status of the user account ( a number of successfully performed purchases with the confirmed authenticity , etc .). this information can be used as a basis for various encouraging actions when consumer will benefit from or will participate to various bonuses programs provided by a mobile communications operator , lotteries , prizes etc . at the same time , this information can be used for product tracing and market analysis . the corresponding database update is performed accordingly , i . e ., the fields , corresponding to the open and the hidden parts of the secure codes of a certified authentic product are marked as “ checked out ” and will no longer be considered as valid codes for any future verification . in case when the hidden part of the pin is not found among the valid secure pins stored in the database of the hidden pins or the open / hidden pins pair does not have a unique match with the corresponding fields in the databases , the authenticity is rejected . in case , the requests that correspond to different open product pins are sent from the same portable device multiple times or the information generated during inside and outside verification stages were received from two different portable devices , the consumer is informed about the mismatch and warned about potential consequences that might vary from preventing access attempts to the authentication verification services performed from the corresponding portable device to a legal issues initiated accordingly to the local law basis regulating mobile communications and illegal activity in mobile networks . 26 — depending on the authentication information storage and acquisition , there exist several possible scenarios of pin data enrolment proposed in the present authentication protocol . we consider a common protocol for both open and hidden parts of the pin . we assume that the pin can be communicated either directly from the product to the acquisition device . the possible ways of communication include but are not limited to : communication in the form that can be perceived using visual or audio modalities or using special inks or frequencies , and indirect secure part that is communicated via special steganographic protocol using tools of digital watermarking that can include images ( natural , synthetic , bar codes , etc . ), text or audio signals . for example according to fig5 , the direct part can be either reproduced on a product surface , package , and label or on a specific attached device depending on the exploited storage principle ( y p ), or , it can be audio reproducible ( y a ) by the device ( 11 ). one option consists in storing the pin in the printed or engraved forms ( 8 ). in order to enhance the security of the authentication protocol as well as to establish the product tracking and to be informed about the fact of product consumption or integrity damage , it is supposed that the hidden part of the authentication information might be encoded , encrypted as well as covered by a layer or cover to be removed or destroyed to reveal the hidden information or printed on the back side of an adhesive label . moreover , to avoid unauthorized product or packaging re - use it is also possible to cover the hidden pin by a removable layer and to print the open part of the pin on top on it . by disclosing the hidden part of the pin the open part is automatically destroyed . the encoding and encryption steps exploit common or distinct secret keys . 27 — in the second foreseen way of authentication information enrollment , the audio channel is exploited . in this case , the information is used to modulate an audio signal produced using spelling based on the visual data y p , mechanical , vibro , piezoelectric or any other appropriate principles of sound generation mentioned in the previous part of the invention . the pin is stored on a storage and reproduction device attached to the product or its package . modulation might be performed in an insecure way as well as using corresponding encryption and encoding based on the random coding principle [ 13 ]. 28 — at the outside restricted shopping area verification stage the stored information is directly acquired from the product , package , label , etc . by removing a protection cover or layer , opening a product package , de - attaching a removable part of a product label , or reproducing a sound and is acquired by existing acquisition / input means integrated into a consumer portable device ( like digital camera , keyboard , microphone or any other available means ). 29 — the acquired information in the form of a typed text , digital photo in one of available graphic formats or audio sequence is used to generate a request transferred to the authentication server . 30 — the information describing the user request is processed on the secure authentication server depending on a particular channel used for its transmission ( visual , audio or steganographic ) and the encryption / encoding involved in the protocol . 31 — in case when the optical channel is exploited for the information acquisition , direct decoding ( 17 ) of data from the barcodes with any modulation ĉ is performed . in case of symbolic data representation , ocr ( 13 ) is used in order to extract un - encoded or encoded / encrypted pin from its analogue form ĉ ′. when a manual input is exploited , the typed coded data ĉ ″ are directly sent to the decoder . in case the encryption / decryption is organized in an asymmetric manner , a pair of a private / public keys are exploited to encrypt and decrypt authentication information , accordingly . 32 — in case , when the audio channel is exploited to communicate the pin , the processing main steps vary depending on which authentication information transmission channel was used or the enrollment stage . when the information is transferred via an optical channel but communicated to the authentication server via audio channel by its spelling it is processed by a speech recognizer resulting in ĉ ′″ and either directly passes to the verification stage or goes through the key - dependent decryption and decoding if necessary . 33 — when the authentication information is modulated as the audio signal at the enrollment stage , the processing might involve a demodulation stage if necessary . 34 — being decoded as the estimate of pin { circumflex over ( m )}, the authentication information is passed to the verification stage where it is compared to the content of the database ( 5 ) after corresponding processing . depending on the result of the verification stage ( 18 ), the corresponding authenticity confirmation / rejection message containing customer account information is generated ( 19 ) as well as the database update is performed accordingly . this stage output is then transferred to the message activation ( 20 ) stage where it is finally communicated to the customer via display ( 21 ), vibro ( 22 ) or audio ( 23 ) signal or any other available information transmission form that might be perceived by a consumer . 35 — the authentication protocol based on printed data can be constructed based on either direct or steganographic channels . the basic direct communication protocol was already discussed in fig5 . the extension of this protocol can include the generation of random or encoded text data or various visual symbologies represented by c . to enhance the security of the protocol , the data c is considered as the cover data that is combined with some hidden part encoded and represented by the watermark ( fig6 ). 36 — the encoding is based on a secret pin m extracted from the database ( 5 ). to provide an additional level of freedom that will increase the security of the proposed protocol the pin m is split into two parts m 1 and m 2 . the first part m 1 jointly with the key k 1 produce the codeword c in ( 7 ) using either host selection from the database ( 7 a ), or by generation of a random codeword where the pair m 1 and k 1 are used as a seed for the random generator ( 7 b ), or encryption , encoding and modulation of m 1 ( 7 c ). in the case of ( 7 c ), m 1 is encoded using turbo , low - density parity check , reed - solomon or any other suitable encoding principle based on the secret key k 1 . in all cases , the resulted data c can be represented in the form of text structures , dots , lines , any symbologies , etc ., vector graphics components ( 1d , 2d or 3d objects ). 37 — the generated output c is passed to a gel &# 39 ; fand - pinsker ( gp ) encoder ( 24 ) with input m 2 based on key k 2 to produce the watermark w that is converted to the stego data y at the embedder ( 25 ) and printed / engraved by the printer ( 9 ) in the form y p on the product surface , packaging , adhesive label or any document certifying the product origin . 38 — at the extraction stage , depending on the particular protocol implementation , several possibilities exist for the stored information y p acquisition . the product authenticity verification can be performed solely based on the direct part of y p without taking into account watermark data similarly to fig5 . in the case when the steganographic channel is additionally involved into the authentication procedure , the decoder ( 26 ) extracts the message { circumflex over ( m )} 2 based on the scanned data v p and the secret key k 2 using gel &# 39 ; fand - pinsker decoder . simultaneously , v p is passed either directly to the decoding ( 17 ) as ĉ or to the ocr ( 13 ) to convert the analogue authentication information into the digital form ĉ ′. alternatively , this operation ( ĉ ″ extraction ) can be performed by a manual input or by spelling via an audio channel ( audio demodulator / sr ( 16 ), extraction of ĉ ′″). the result of this stage ( ĉ , ĉ ′, ĉ ″ or ĉ ′″) is passed to the decoder ( 17 ), where { circumflex over ( m )} 1 is decoded based on the secret key k 1 . the result of the decoding stage ({ circumflex over ( m )} 1 , and { circumflex over ( m )} 2 ), similarly to the setup considered in fig5 , is compared to the data provided by the database ( 5 ) at the verification stage ( 18 ). depending on the result of the verification stage , the corresponding authenticity confirmation / rejection message containing consumer account information is generated ( 19 ) as well as the database update is performed accordingly . the output is then transferred to the message activation ( 20 ) stage where it is finally communicated to the customer via display ( 21 ), vibro ( 22 ) or audio ( 23 ) signal or any other available information transmission form that might be perceived by a customer . 39 — the authentication protocol based on the audio data is similar to one based on the printed data and can be constructed based on either direct or steganographic channels . the basic direct authentication protocol can be organized based on the random waveforms ( fig7 ) or coded waveforms ( fig8 ). in both cases , a pin m is extracted from the database ( 5 ). 40 — according to the random waveforms approach ( fig7 ), m is used as a seed for the random audio waveform generator ( 27 ) with the output y a that is stored on the storage and reproduction device ( 10 ). at the extraction stage , the stored signal is reproduced via the loudspeaker ( 11 ) from which the reproduced wave is acquired by a microphone ( 15 ) of a consumer portable device ( v a ) and is passed to the verification stage ( 18 ) where it is compared to the waveforms generated by the random audio waveform generator ( 27 ) based on the product m , considered to be a seed that is received from the database ( 5 ). 41 — according to the coded waveforms approach ( fig8 ), a pin m is extracted from the database ( 5 ) and is passed to the encryption ( 28 ) where the secure encrypted bit stream b is produced based on the secret key k . in order to enable reliable communications of b , it is converted to a codeword c at the k - dependent encoder ( 7 ) using turbo , low - density parity check , reed - solomon or any other suitable for this purpose encoding techniques . finally , an audio signal y a is encoded , recorded and saved in a way suitable for audio reproduction using storage and reproduction device ( 10 ) that is attached to the product surface , its package or adhesive label . the authentication is performed in the reverse order . 42 — in the case when the steganographic channel is used for the secure authentication , the protocol is constructed similarly to those used for printed data ( fig6 ) and is shown in fig9 . the only difference consists in the fact that the audio signals and corresponding modulation , reproduction and demodulation means are used as opposed to the printing / engraving and scanning . 43 — in the case of both printed and audio data based authentication there is a need to provide reliable decoding and verification of the product data . the problems of product authentication based on printed data using text , images or any graphical symbologies are caused by the printing / scanning , defocusing ( blurring ), resolution constraints of portable device imaging camera , geometrical distortions , nonlinear contrast transformation as well as restrictions of messaging protocol that might cause additional resizing and / or compression . similar corresponding distortions can occur for the audio - based authentication . therefore , proper techniques should be applied to enable errorless communication of pin to the verification module ( 18 ). 44 — we propose three main practical approaches to overcome the above problems based on : correcting errors that might occur at the acquisition stage by introducing proper redundancy using coding and synchronization ; taking into account the above hypothetical distortions in the design of proper representation of encoded features / hashes in the database of pins ; designing robust verification procedures invariant to the defined types of distortions . 45 — the first approach attempts to design reliable coding strategies capable to provide errorless decoding of the pin index m after data acquisition in portable device and its communication to the verification stage . we will exemplify this approach based on the text data assuming that without loss of generality the same strategy can be extended to images , symbologies and audio . for the high flexibility of the pin communication protocol , we assume that the data can be entered either manually by the human being , who is in some sense the best ocr , or acquired automatically by the camera . for this reason , the proposed construction of robust coding includes such an encoder ( 7 ) ( fig1 ), which maps the pin m and key k into the codeword c , which consists of two parts , i . e ., regular part c rp and parity check c pc part . the regular part c rp is dedicated to the direct human acquisition while the parity check part c pc can be entered either by the human ( fig1 ) or communicated via some auxiliary channel ( fig1 ). this example is rather demonstrative since in principle both parts c rp and c pc can also be automatically acquired by the imaging device . 46 — the protocol presented in fig1 generalizes the communication setups when both parts are communicated via the same channel that might include printing , scanning , blurring , rotation resizing or more generally affine or projective transformations and compression for the printed data and corresponding distortions that might occur during reproduction and acquisition of audio data . in this case , both parts [ c rp , c pc ] are modulated into data y that can be either some meaningful alphanumeric data or coded symbologies or graphics that is communicated via some channel ( 33 ) that results into the distorted version v . the demodulator or feature extraction ( fe ) ( 34 ) produces the estimate of the vector [ ĉ rp , ĉ pc ] and the decoder ( 17 ) generates the estimation of the pin { circumflex over ( m )}. 47 — the pin communication protocol presented in fig1 is based on the redundant data encoding similar to fig1 with the only difference that the c pc part of the code is communicated via some auxiliary channel ( channel 2 ( 37 )). this provides additional flexibility since the c rp part is human readable and can be manually or orally spelled while the c pc part assumes machine based decoding . the channel 2 ( 37 ) can be represented by the barcode , or any coded symbologies , watermark that can be embedded into some extra image or directly into the c rp part . c pc part is encoded at the encoder 2 ( 36 ) and decoded at the decoder 2 ( 38 ) that correspond to the above cases . 48 — the second approach attempts at predicting hypothetical channel distortions at the encoding stage to avoid a possible mismatch after decoding or hashing at the verification stage due to the channel degradations . obviously , one can try to build the robust hash for this purpose . however , since the channel degradations are predictable at the encoder the benefit from this sort of side information can be significant , which simplifies the requirements regarding the robustness of the hash or error correction code . the block - diagram of this approach is shown in fig1 . the pin m or the encoded pin c is modulated at the modulator ( 32 ) to produce the output data y . a copy of these data goes through the channel simulator ( 39 ) that results in v ′ and the demodulator / feature extractor ( 34 ) produces an estimate ĉ . the hashing or decoding is accomplished in the block ( 40 ) based on the key k that finally results in h . it should be noticed that h should not necessarily coincide with m or c on the input of the system . h is considered as a hash and stored in the database ( 5 ) under the index m . at the same time the second copy of y is communicated through the real channel ( 33 ) and decoded as ĥ passing the demodulator ( 34 ) and decoding / hashing ( 40 ). the verification of ĥ is performed in module ( 18 ) by comparing it with the counterpart h from ( 5 ). 49 — the third approach is based on the usage of robust verification procedures such as for example levenshtein distance that measures the similarity between two vectors even with different lengths . the change of 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