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Parmesan Makers Add Microchips To Cheese Wheels To Foil Counterfeiters
(www.tomshardware.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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This is literally just a type of NFC. The same type of thing that's used whenever you scan your credit card or use an Amiibo. It is interesting that it doesn't use RFID standards, but conceptually it's the same idea of an ultra-low-power chip with an antenna with the only purpose being to transmit a few bytes of data when scanned.
I think the appeal here is the chip is uncloneable, unlike ordinary rfid tags, so counterfeit products can't just clone it serial number. I wonder how useful it is in practice though. Unlike RFID tags which can be scanned by phones, customers probably don't have the proprietary scanner in hand to scan this chip, right? How do you know your cheese wheel is fake or not in that situation. You'll probably have to trust the store you bought it from, but if the store want to sell fake product, adding this chip to real products probably won't prevent those fraudulent stores from selling fake products to their customers. Am I missing something here?
Also, it's claimed that it's uncloneable. We'll see how well that actually stands up to a counterfeit market with lots of money to throw at it
They'd need a crap ton of money to throw at it lol, especially if the cheese makers decide to use Mifare NFC tech. That relies on the chips being signed using a write-once private key, and optionally also returning a kind of OTP that is only known to the NFC chip when it's sent a special command or "challenge".
Transit cards and contact less/chipped bank cards rely on something similar to prevent cloning (although Bank cards are actually running a Java-based OS, and can perform more complex calculations, or even just applications as programmed by the bank)
I'd be shocked if they picked some insecure type of nfc tech lol, or relied on the chip IDs which are easily cloneable
End users (so to speak) usally don't buy full parmesan wheels, anyway ;)
Not near field, since it uses photovoltaic cells with a pulsed laser for power.