Counterfeit products represent 5% of all imports in the EU, amounting to as much as 119 billion € annually, and growing, in the EU alone. This is a critical socio-economic problem that causes enormous losses to industry and seriously threatens human health. The WHO reports that 10% of medicines circulating worldwide are counterfeits and fake medicines kill more than 250,000 children/year.

Despite being widely implemented, most current anti-counterfeiting tags (like holograms, watermarks or radiofrequency identification tags) are based on deterministic encoding mechanisms that can be duplicated or faked. Physically unclonable function (PUF) tags address this security vulnerability as they cannot be duplicated because of their natural physical variability, which makes each tag unique and impossible to repeat or falsify.

SUBTLE combines biobased optical tags and digital transformation, towards a new generation of  low-cost & sustainable multifunctional PUF authentication system including invisible physical tags and an AI authentication algorithm stored in the Cloud.

SUBTLE will contribute to prevent health risks, financial losses, and erosion of brand reputation by ensuring product authenticity and safety across the supply chain until the consumer, in line with goals 3 and 9 and 12 of the 2030 Agenda.