University of Waterloo (Canada) and an anti-counterfeiting startup

Students from the University of Waterloo are working to commercialize an ink they say can be used in anti-counterfeiting measures in products ranging from money to medications to pesticides and more. From an Aug. 7, 2015 article by Matthew Braga for Motherboard.com (Note: A link has been removed),

The ink is pretty much invisible to the naked eye, which isn’t new, but blast it with a pulse from a smartphone camera’s flash, run the resulting image through some fancy processing algorithms, and the result is a unique numerical sequence that can verify the authenticity of whatever product it’s been applied to.

Their company is named Arylla (formerly Black Box Technologies), and was founded by Ben Rasera, Graham Thomas, and Perry Everett—all final year students in Waterloo’s nanotechnology engineering program. …

“In a nutshell, we are making inks that have unique optical signatures that can be verified using a smartphone,” Everett said in a phone interview. The ink can be printed on pretty much anything, from a computer chip to something organic, like an apple (although who counterfeits an apple?). They’re focusing on electronics for now.

Braga notes in his article that there are few details about the ‘nano ink’ mentioned,

“It’s a fairly new material as far as nanotechnology goes,” Everett said, but declined to name what, specifically, they were working with—only that it was a modified version of a material that is relatively new. “The most interesting aspect of the material is you can basically tune the properties in order to act like a barcode. So when I say optical signature what I’m talking about is a numerical sequence, and that sequence is embedded in the nanomaterial,” he explained.

The barcode is based on both the physical pattern of the application of the ink itself, and the colours that are reflected when the flash hits the nanomaterial.

There’s more information in the article about the company and some rather interesting speculation on Braga’s part as to how counterfeiters might respond to this new measure should it prove successful.

An Aug. 10, 2015 University of Waterloo news release provides information about the students’ work and their startup, Arylla (Note: Links have been removed),

Last year, more than 60,000 counterfeit Canadian bank notes passed into circulation. But a new ink from the Velocity Science startup Arylla could change that.

The nano inks can be applied to just about anything from money to tiny microprocessors to handbags. Since the inks are also biocompatible and non-toxic they can be applied to pills and even liquids, such as pesticides.

Last month, the company (formerly known as Black Box Technologies) won $25,000 at the Spring Velocity Fund Final competition.

Good luck to the students! You can find Arylla here.

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