SAN FRANCISCO—Inside Secure, the French based security chip vendor, will demonstrate its latest near field communications (NFC)-based anti-counterfeiting chip next week at the DESIGN West conference in San Jose, Calif.
Inside Secure's VaultIC160,
launched last month, is a memory-enriched NFC-based security solution designed for embedding into high-end consumer or industrial products that are often targeted by counterfeiters and cloners. The chip packs 14 Kbytes of accessible programmable non-volatile memory in addition to 1.5 Kbytes of non-volatile memory used to hold authentication certificate information. According to Inside Secure, the increased memory allows consumer goods vendors or other suppliers to store product-related information on the chip such as pictures, recipes, customs forms or manufacturing history
"The aim of this product is to provide an anti-counterfeiting solution for devices that are not connected to the Internet," said Benoit Makowka, a marketing and application director at Inside Secure (Aix-En-Provence, France). Makowka said Inside Secure has previously demonstrated VaultIC160's predecessor, VaultIC150, at tradeshows but that this will be the first time the company has publicly demonstrated the newest chip.
According to Makowka, VaultIC160 will enable manufacturers of high-end consumer goods, such as handbags, wine, watches and consumables to track their products through distribution and retail channels, and allow consumers to verify that the product is an original and not a counterfeit using an NFC-equipped smartphonesor a simple contactless reader
"Even when the smartphone is not connected to the network, there is already a strong identification between the phone and the chip, so it can essentially identify the product," Makowka said.
Vault IC160's wireless NFC interface has a range of several centimetres, enabling the chip to be deeply embedded into a product without leaving any visible trace, according to Inside Secure. VaultIC160 includes voltage, frequency and temperature detectors, illegal code execution prevention, tampering monitors and protection against side channel attacks and probing, the firm said. The chip can also detect tampering attempts and destroy sensitive data on such events, thus avoiding data confidentiality being compromised, the firm said.
Inside Secure will be exhibiting in booth No. 621 at
DESIGN West, set for March 26 to March 29 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose.