4 ms·
In order to not be trivially defeatable, it sounds quite hard. You can't, for example, use sequential blocks of ids — far too easy for a counterfeiter to revers
by fredley 7y ago
In order to not be trivially defeatable, it sounds quite hard. You can't, for example, use sequential blocks of ids — far too easy for a counterfeiter to reverse-engineer valid ranges. Which means that you either generate them through some cryptographic signing process - non trivial and the risk of compromised keys, or just generate random guids centrally meaning there's a request/response somewhere in the production cycle to get ids, or batches of ids - also non trivial.
The whole thing sounds like it's a really obvious and simple solution at a glance, but as you dig into it it seems hard, especially for smaller players, and only shifts the counterfeiters' workload (now you need to figure out how to steal barcodes, not impossible depending on how much money you invest).
- arkitaip 7y agoCountless solutions have tried to solve the problem of counterfeit goods by using some kind of unique identifier but I don't know of any that has seen widespread usage. The difference is that Amazon is exceptional at tech and has the marketplace to implement and improve their solution over many years. Hopefully Amazon's solution becomes cheap and easy to use for even small brands (but realistically it only needs to be less expensive than the cost of counterfeits to be adopted). If Amazon's Transparency is REALLY GOOD, they could offer it as a service through AWS. There's an enormous demand for this sort of solution.
- sudhirj 7y agoThe article says each SKU gets its own codes (and my understanding is that Amazon maintains SKU metadata internally and all resellers sell against it). My guess would be a variation of skuUUID:itemUUID:sha1(skuUUID+itemUUID+skuSecret), encoded as a QR code. UUID could be a smaller int ID, hash could be a base64 encode if you need to save space.