Alien Unveils Dynamic Security App for Higgs 3 Chip

End users, such as Italian garment manufacturer G&P Net, plan to employ the Higgs 3 chip's unique TID in order to bolster the authentication of tagged apparel shipped from its distribution centers to retail outlets. The retailer already pairs the unique serial number encoded to each tag with information stored in its warehouse management system, such as the time and location at which the tag has already been read. In this way, the company can trace any gray-market items introduced to the supply chain by a third party (see RFID Targets Gray Market in Europe). But soon, Vega says, the retailer will also begin storing the 96-bit TID encoded to the Higgs 3 tags it attaches to clothing items, and associating that with the tag serial number and ancillary data (size and style) for each apparel item, in order to add an anticounterfeiting measure to the system.

Since the tag ID is factory-programmed, it won't appear on more than one tag—whereas if users read only the serial number they encode to the tag, there's no way to ensure that the tag is not a clone that was encoded with the same serial number.

Pfizer started using this method for fighting counterfeit Viagra utilizing high-frequency (HF) tags in 2006 (see Pfizer Using RFID to Fight Fake Viagra).

If someone wanted to clone an EPC tag carrying a Higgs 3 chip, Vega indicates, he or she would need to be "very rich and have tremendous resources" in order to copy not just an EPC or other unique serial number encoded to the chip, but also that chip's unique TID, and encode both to a new chip. Nonetheless, he says, Alien's Higgs 3 strategy has been to layer security functions into the product in order to build up an arsenal of security tools. "Counterfeiters will generally try to find a way around the latest security measure," he notes, "so the industry always needs to be ready to pull out a new tool from its tool chest to throw the frauds off guard."

Another custom security feature on the Higgs 3 chip is called ReadLock. With this feature, users can parse the 512 bits of user memory on the Higgs 3 chip into eight separate 64-bit blocks. An end user can permanently lock any of these blocks, so that the information cannot be altered. It can also prohibit third parties from reading any of these blocks by protecting them with a password that a third party needs in order to read the data.