The goal of any business is to sell products that make its consumers satisfied. This could be in regards to wellness in the pharmaceutical industry or to be trendy in the luxury industry. However, many of these products can be counterfeited or contain counterfeit parts resulting in negative consequences that are incalculable such as injury to the consumer and or brand reputation damage.
In order to make sure that products are made with authentic materials, U-NICA has come up with a solution to register micro-deviations on whatever surface. This solution is called surTRACE.
Why use surTRACE
When raw material is processed, it contains small microscopic anomalies that exist either naturally or created during manufacturing. U-NICA’s surTRACE technology records these anomalies and allows you and your customers the ability to verify the product via the materials.
Recording these anomalies are done by advanced camera technology, but it is now also possible to do so with certain new smartphones that have a high camera resolution, making surTRACE even easier to use and even more user-friendly.
Due to the accessibility of surTRACE’s verification system, the ability to verify if it is the right product, where it was made and if it complies with all relevant regulations guarantees trust and integrity at any stage of the supply chain.
How surTRACE works
Before different members of the supply chain can verify products, there are important steps that need to be done while the raw materials are processed and the product is being made.
- The business takes ultra-macro shots of the anomalies on the surface of whatever material is used.
- These macro-recordings contain the physical unclonable features (PUFs), which are random structures or anomalies.
- The random structures are converted into a number sequence.
- These number sequences are quickly and securely stored in the database that only verified users can access.
After completing these steps, microscopic pictures are taken to compare the anomalies with those already stored in the database in order to verify the product.
However, surTRACE is one part of U-NICA’s digital brand protection solutions.
U-NICA and the scryptoTRACE suite
Founded in 2004 with the goal of bringing the expertise of banknote protection and authentication to other industries, U-NICA further improved these methods and technology to make it accessible to all those threatened with forgery.
This mission created U-NICA’s scryptoTRACE suite, which covers three major services, market monitoring, print layout management, and secure label management. In addition to surTRACE, companies can also incorporate U-NICA’s Digital Security Label, an adhesive label that can be applied to any type of packaging.
Unlike other anti-counterfeit strategies available, scryptoTRACE suite offers multiple layers of protection that is scalable for any type of organization at affordable prices.