The invention of O—KEYs

How O—KEYs were invented

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“We live in an age where Rembrandts and Rolexes are copied in a quality, where we cannot tell authentic from counterfeit"

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A Danish Chemistry Professor, specializing in luminescent materials, is at the world's largest specialized Chemistry Conference. He attends a keynote on the practical applications of luminescent materials and hears a colleague discuss the use of fluorescent inks for printing invisible QR codes that illuminate under black light.

This method is supposed to be the leading technology for anti-counterfeiting. However, the Professor is confused because using pigments similar to those in the white layer of fluorescent tubes seems too basic to be considered as cutting-edge.

The Professor is thinking. Hard-to-make-technologies, is what we have relied on for decades to protect our most valuable objects, MONEY. The Professor goes to the ECB and looks at all the different security features, and he finds that they all rely on being hard-to-make. There are many of them, but we live in an age where Rembrandts and Rolexes are copied in a quality, where we cannot tell authentic from counterfeit. We can make anything.

So how do we protect against counterfeits? The problem is large: thousands of lives are lost to counterfeit medicine, fake food make us lose faith in our supermarkets, and counterfeits incurs billions of euros in losses every year. What measures can we take?

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The Professor discovers that the only unique feature of each Euro note is the serial number, and finds copy-protection technologies that are following the serial number.

We’ve all seen Hollywood movies where numbered notes play a key role in ransoms or robberies. Tracking these serial numbers can enhance security, but it requires meticulous record-keeping, making it more of a workaround than a true solution. The Professor wonders if the serial number itself could be made secure.

Serial numbers can be printed as numbers, barcodes, QR codes, or embedded in RFID/NFC chips. They can even be made invisible using Digimarc® or luminescent ink. However, all these methods still allow the serial number to be copied. Are there no better solutions?

The next day, the Professor, driven by his obsession, explores anti-counterfeiting solutions more thoroughly at the Conference. It was then he discovered Pappu's groundbreaking research on Physical Unclonable Functions. He immediately realizes the potential of this technology. Eureka! The concept of O-KEYs, serial numbers that cannot be copied, emerged.

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