“Fingerprinting” chips to fight counterfeiting
It’s often said that no two human fingerprints are exactly alike. For that reason, police often use them as evidence to link suspects to crime scenes. The same goes for silicon chips: Manufacturing processes cause microscopic variations in chips that are unpredictable, permanent, and effectively impossible to clone. MIT spinout Verayo is now using these unclonable variations to “fingerprint” silicon chips used in consumer-product tags — which can then be scanned via mobile device and authenticated — to aid in the fight against worldwide counterfeiting. According to a 2013 United Nations report, about 2 to 5 percent of internationally traded goods — including electronics, food, and pharmaceuticals — are counterfeited, costing governments and private companies hundreds of billions of dollars annually. “This is low-cost authentication using ‘silicon biometrics,’” says Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Verayo’s co-founder and chief scientist. Verayo’s technology — now in use worldwide —...