Threats in supply chains, such as counterfeiting, product piracy and product recall, are growing dramatically in terms of volume, sophistication, and countries affected. No longer is the phenomenon specific for certain products or markets. Alongside the luxury goods and fashion industries, illicit products are increasingly finding their way into other sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, automobile spare parts, and fast moving consumer goods. The fact that scrapped products illicitly go back into the legitimate supply chain, highlights the issues of products, with the wrong status, entering the market. These problems impose a severe threat to the consumers’ health and safety. The economic and social consequences for governments, consumers and businesses are significant. The global network of the Auto-ID Labs, which has been the driving force of the Internet of Things, have identified anti-counterfeiting and secure supply chain as their first Flagship Project. The high dimensional problem of piracy goods calls for multi-faceted and diverse solution approaches that go beyond today\'s techniques, such as paper pedigree and optical security features. The Auto-ID Labs will apply their RFID expertise regarding business processes, software/network and hardware in order to fight counterfeit products. The advent of an RFID solution for securing supply chain will inevitably impact today\'s EPC Network. It is the role of the Auto-ID Labs to shape an EPC Network that integrates new services for anticounterfeiting and, as such, becomes capable for the authentication of tag ID\'s. The Auto-ID Labs have already gained expertise in the field of anti-counterfeiting within Special Interest Groups, industry projects, and research programs supported by the European Union, and thus are well prepared to provide valuable solution approaches to this highly relevant and global problem. The mission of the Anti-Counterfeiting & Secure Supply Chain Flagship Project is to develop secure, comprehensive, cost effective and convenient product authentication mechanisms based on Auto-ID technology helping to secure global trade. The goal of this document is to outline the research questions within the Anti-Counterfeiting & Secure Supply Chain Flagship Project.
This paper is to appear in the book: Networked RFID Systems and Lightweight Cryptography Raising Barriers to Product Counterfeiting Cole, Peter H.; Ranasinghe, Damith C. (Eds.) 2007, Approx. 360 p., Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-540-71640-2 www.springer.com/dal/home/generic/search/results
After a trademark dispute, the EPC Prototyping Platform is now called "Fosstrak" (previously Accada). Fosstrak stands for "free and open source software for track and trace".