Securing composite objects using digital fingerprints
AssigneeAlitheon, Inc.
InventorDavid Justin Ross
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A system comprises a combination of digital fingerprint authentication techniques, processes, programs, and hardware to facilitate highly reliable authentication of a wide variety of composite physical objects. “Composite” in this case means that there are distinct regions of the object that must be authenticating individually and in tandem to authenticate the entire object. Preferably, a template is stored that defines for a class of objects what regions must be found, their locations, optionally semantic content of the regions, and other criteria. digital fingerprinting is utilized to locate and attempt to match candidate regions by querying a database of reference object records.
Claims13
A computer-implemented method to authenticate a composite physical object, the method comprising:
- selecting a class of objects to which the composite physical object belongs;
- accessing a stored template provided for authenticating objects of the selected class of objects;
- identifying the regions of the object specified in the template as required for authentication;
- scanning at least the identified regions of the composite physical object to acquire image data for each identified region;
- processing the acquired image data to extract digital fingerprints of each of the identified regions, wherein each digital fingerprint is based solely on one or more native features of the composite physical object and not based on any identifier, label, or other proxy added to the composite physical object for identification or authentication;
- based on the digital fingerprints, querying a database of reference objects of the selected class of objects to obtain a matching record, wherein the matching record requires that each and every identified region of the composite physical object match a corresponding region of a reference object in the matching record, based on the corresponding digital fingerprints, within a selected tolerance;
- and
- determining authenticity of the composite physical object based on the matching record, wherein:
- the selected class of composite physical objects is electronic apparatus;
- the corresponding template includes a list of components required to be mounted in the electronic apparatus as a condition of authentication regardless of their locations;
- and
- matching requires matching each of the required components to corresponding components in a reference database based on their digital fingerprints.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.