Trust is becoming an increasingly important factor in the life-cycle of consumables, from medicine to dietary supplements and diverse food products. According to World Health Organization (WHO), one out of 10 medicines in developing countries are falsified. There is a critical need to develop low-cost, reliable and non-invasive authentication method for consumables. We have designed a novel, reliable, and effective authentication method for consumables by using embeded tags that provide unique chemical signatures based on nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) spectroscopy. 

As illustrated in this figure, this approach allows a product to be authinticated at any stage of the supply chain using a portable NQR spectrometer and a computing device (e.g. a smart phone) that runs a customized application. A manufacturer needs to store the NQR signatures of the ingredients being used for product authentication in a cloud server (preferably in encrypted form to avoid data theft) before forwarding the product to later stages in the supply chain. The cloud server can be used to protect and control the access of tag information from unauthorized users. It can also be used for defending against common attacks like eavesdropping and man-in-the- middle attacks. This integrity verification step can either be used to authenticate the product and/or to trace it back to a manufacturer. As the NQR signatures are extremely hard to duplicate, the ingredients under test (known as chemical tags) can be used to check for different integrity issues, e.g., adulteration, mislabeling, and contamination. In case of authentication failure at any stage, the product can be brought to the attention of the manufacturer and/or regulatory authorities and appropriate measures can be taken. The proposed authentication method uses both intrinsic tags and extrinsic tags.