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38 W i n e s & V i n e s O C T O b e r 2 0 1 4 The level of security provided by NFC is particularly high since this technology has been used in the banking sector for more than 20 years. HIS Technology estimates that NFC will be available on two-thirds of telephones launched on the market by 2018. During the next two or three years we will see numerous applications emerging that are in the evaluation phase in most industrial and service sectors. The number of units sold with embedded NFC tech- nology will thus increase from 4 million in 2012 to 43.4 million in 2017, The Mo- bile Economy reports. Some recent exam- ples from 2013-14: • 5,000 volunteers tested a means of pay- ment using NFC for their London Un- derground tickets. • Amsterdam Airport installed boarding gates that can be used with NFC tech- nology by passengers carrying a smartphone. • In China, a partnership between the world's largest mobile network operator and the Chinese bankcard association planned to launch NFC payments in 14 Chinese cities. The market value of RFID and authen- tication is expected to increase from $500 million in 2013 to $3.5 billion in 2020, Secure ID News reports. the strategic importance of the consumer Wine consumers generally have faith in brands and trade names at points of sale. If this confidence is not complete, they will try to verify the conformity or au- thenticity of the product they wish to pur- chase or consume. The first control level is the presence of an integral tamper-proofing device (un- broken, not reconstituted). This type of control does not require any particular knowledge: Packaging must be correctly closed and absent signs of having been opened. If in doubt, the consumer will not purchase or consume the bottle in question. In order to make his choice or carry out additional checks, the consumer will ex- amine the information shown on the product (indicating provenance, labels, precautions, etc.). If the brand has imple- mented this functionality, the consumer can refer to a website using a Data Ma- trix or a QR code via his or her smartphone. If the consumer wishes to check the au- thenticity of the product (i.e., that the prod- uct has been placed on the market by the "proper" manufacturer), he must have ac- cess to secure means for carrying out this verification. Whatever these means are, the consumer needs to know what to check and how. This implies the provision of informa- tion about the brand to the consumer. As described in the first part of this series, numerous solutions exist for "marking" a product. This plurality makes it impossible for a consumer to memorize the markings and distinguish between them. except in specific cases, the consumer will have to call on external assistance by means of a tool that is as standardized as possible. According to a 2014 article by the French chemists' group Société des ex- perts Chimistes de France, currently there is a strong trend to place the consumer at the center of the anti-counterfeiting device by enabling him to check the authenticity of the product he is purchasing using a smartphone. The process consists of asso- ciating a unique identifier with each bot- tle of wine and registering this identifier in an accessible database. This enables the consumer to check remotely in the data- base whether the identifier matches the bottle in question. The code is usually dig- ital or alphanumeric, but a graphical rep- resentation on the object is also possible and can be compared with the one from the database. The fact that the consumer can easily verify the authenticity of the bottle offers a great advantage in terms of simplicity, and the smartphone offers greater flexibil- ity of use compared to devices that re- quire specific control equipment. There is a great variety of these dedicated verifica- tion systems, but it is impossible for the verification services (laboratories, cus- toms, etc.) to have all the necessary equip- ment at their disposal. Another inconvenient aspect of these dedicated verification systems is that veri- fication is carried out a posteriori in case of doubt and once a large proportion of counterfeit wines has already been distrib- uted. The fact that the "signatures" (inte- grated in the glass, molecular with syn- thetically derived DNA, holographic, etc.) are very difficult to reproduce is therefore not a sufficient reason to protect a bottle from the risk of counterfeiting, since using specific control apparatus complicates and undermines the extent of the verifications. Counterfeiters are aware that the goods are unlikely to be checked and manage to make visual imitations of these signatures, which give the consumer a false sense of security since the likelihood that mass- produced items such as wine will be veri- fied remains exceedingly low. This means that the smartphone solu- tion cannot function unless security prin- ciples are taken into account, especially in the management of SMS (short-message service). Scanning a fraudulent code presents ac- tual risk to the consumer of ending up on a pirated site, hence the importance of an SMS, which has a dynamic security proto- col permitting strong authentication and reducing the risk of fraud. However, SMS has the advantage of providing a direct and specific computer connection, which minimizes such a risk. These authentication elements that can be controlled by the consumer by means of a tool likewise offer a number of advantages: • They can be easy to integrate. • They are unknown to the uninitiated. • They can easily be reinforced. • They may entitle the holder to manage the entire process. Criteria for choosing an anti-counterfeiting technology It is necessary to take into account the ex- tent of the counterfeiting problem for the alcohol in question, its pricing, the com- pany's budget and strategy as well as the proprietary solutions that the producer may own. However, the diagram on page 39 en- ables several trends to be illustrated: • oVD technologies, in particular holo- grams, although they are reasonably priced and relatively easy to integrate, Consumers Prepared to Purchase Wine Using Anti-Counterfeiting Technology RHyS PENDER / 2010 yes 75% No 18% Don't know 7% p a c k a g i n g