Posh and Blocks

The interesting world of provenance reimplemented

Anyway, regardless of the reasons for it, let’s think about how to tell the real thing from the fake thing using technology. Suppose RFID is used to implement Electronic Product Codes (EPCs) for luxury goods. If I see a Gucci handbag on sale in a shop, I will be able to point my Bluetooth EPC-reading pen at it and read the EPC, which is just a number. My mobile phone can decode the number and then tell me that the handbag is Gucci product 999, serial number 888. This information is, by itself, of little use to me. I could go onto the Gucci-lovers website and find out that product 999 is a particular kind of handbag, but nothing more: I may know that the tag is ‘valid’, but that doesn’t tell much about the bag. For all I know, a bunch tags might have been taken off of real products and attached to fake products.

To know if something is real or not, I need more data. If I wanted to know if the handbag were real or fake, then I would need to obtain its provenance as well as its product details. The provenance might be distributed quite widely. The retailer’s database would know from which distributor the bag came; the distributor’s database would know from which factory the bag came and Gucci’s database should know all of this. I would need access to these data to get the data I would need to decide whether the bag is real or fake.

This is a critical point. The key to all of this is not the product itself but the provenance. A database of provenance (for example) is the core of a system to tell real from fake at scale.

Who should control this database, and who should have access to it, is rather complicated. Even if I could read some identifier from the product, why would the retailer, the distributor or Gucci tell me any about the provenance? How would they know whether I were a retailer, one of their best customers, one of their own ‘brand police’, a counterfeiter (who would love to know which tags are in which shops and so on) or a law enforcement officer with a warrant?

This is where the need for a digital identity comes into the picture. A Gucci brand policeman might have a Bluetooth pen tag reader connected to a mobile. They could then point the pen at a bag and fire off a query: the query would have a digital signature attached (from the SIM or SE) and the Gucci savant could check that signature before processing the query. Gucci could then send a digitally signed and encrypted query to the distributor’s savant which would then send back a digitally signed and encrypted response to be passed back to the brand policeman: ‘No we’ve never heard of this bag’ or ‘We shipped this bag to retailer X on this date’ or ‘We’ve just been queried on this bag in Australia’ or something similar.

The central security issue for brand protection is therefore the protection of (and access to) the provenance data, and this needs a digital identity infrastructure to work properly. If it adds £20 to the price of a Rolex to implement this infrastructure, so what? The kind of people who pay £5,000 for a Rolex wouldn’t hesitate to pay £5,020 for a Rolex that can prove that it is real.

A small brand premium might be rather popular with people who like brands. Imagine the horror of being the host of a dinner party when one of the guests glances at their phone and says “you know those jeans aren’t real Gucci, don’t you?”. Wouldn’t you pay £20 for the satisfaction of knowing that your snooping guest’s Bluetooth pen is steadfastly attesting to all concerned that your Marlboro, Paracetamol and Police sunglasses are all real? Of course you would.

If this works, and it’s simple and convenient for consumers, some sort of app presumably, it will generate an amazing amount of valuable data for brand owners. They will know exactly who has their stuff and how much of it they’ve got. If the app records “fail” results as well, then they’ll also know who has the knock-offs!

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