Start-up claims to have developed 'unclonable' chip
Verayo, a new Silicon Valley firm, claims to have produced an “unclonable” RFID chip. According to the company, the new system used to produce the chips is based on a technology developed by MIT researchers.
The technology, called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), uses minute differences in the silicon used in RFID chips to make them individually recognizable. When scanned by an RFID reader, the chip broadcasts a 64-bit string of numbers and letters that uniquely identifies it.
According to a press release from Verayo, PUFs are tiny electrical circuit that use unavoidable IC fabrication process variations to generate unlimited numbers of unique, unpredictable, though reliable “secrets” from each chip.
“Since it is impossible to model or duplicate the IC fabrication process variations, even for the IC manufacturer, it is impossible to generate the same challenge response pairs from another chip,” the company claims.
The race to disprove the cloning-proof claims should begin next week, when Verayo releases its first commercial product featuring the technology, the VERA X1 RFID tag. ![[end]](/resources/bullet/rfidnews-4.gif)
