Identification and authentication technologies for a traceability system

Traceability has become a familiar concept to consumers. The word has even become part of everyday language.

The quest for safety is omnipresent in our daily lives (health, agri-food, etc.). Consumers and citizens want to be reassured, and are ready to take legal action if they are concerned by a fault or a potential or proven risk. Businesses, organizations and governments are faced with new threats in their macro-environment: economic aggression (economic intelligence, counterfeiting) or physical aggression (mafia-style banditry, terrorism). The need to prevent risk is omnipresent. Traceability has thus become a key concern for many companies and organizations.

Over and above risk management, it's a genuine strategic approach leading to the implementation of traceability systems within the company, with the aim of ensuring competitiveness and sustainability, and contributing to the creation of value.

Awareness of the need for traceability has generated a great deal of creativity in technology, creativity that was not very well organized at the outset, but which is tending to take shape in terms of standards, interoperable system architectures and inherent security.

In many cases, the response to a need leads to a multi-faceted traceability system combining identification, authentication, localization and security, and opening up the prospect of new associated services.

This dossier looks at the technologies that support identification and authentication functions.