Little wonders

A two-day conference held at Westminster’s Church House Conference Centre just prior to the Christmas break – and devoted to the crime prevention and detection implications of this intriguing subject – revealed that the boffins labouring away in R&D laboratories are already producing nanotechnology-related solutions of direct relevance to security managers.

It’s very much an expanding area offering exciting potential in terms of its ability to address previously intractable problems, and a golden opportunity to improve upon current defences against crime by implementing genuinely innovative technological advances.

Sensing, perhaps, the need to bridge an apparent gap between perception and reality, conference organiser the Institute of Nanotechnology joined forces with the Scottish Business Crime Centre (having already gained sponsorship from the Department of Trade and Industry under its Basic Technologies Programme) to explore the role of nano-based technologies and the ways in which they seem set to change our approach to crime detection.

Sure enough, this ‘scratching of the surface’-style exercise underlined the immediate relevance of nanotechnology in, for example, tackling graffiti, counterfeiting, fraud, drug testing, food package tampering and information security attacks.

What is nanotechnology?
In the nanotechnology world, we’re essentially dealing with a significant shift of our everyday thinking in terms of measurement.

Nanotechnology can best be described as a catch-all term relating to every activity at the level of atoms and molecules which has applications in the real world. To be specific, a nanometre is a billionth of a metre. In other words, about 1/80,000th the diameter of a human hair, or ten times the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Pretty small, in other words.

Just in case you need some further reference, one million nanometres equals one millimetre, while someone who’s six feet tall would measure two billion nanometres.

Nanotechnology encompasses precision engineering as well as electronics, electromechanical systems (including ‘lab on chip’ devices) and more mainstream biomedical applications. This functionality has relevance in areas including pharmaceuticals, environmental protection, space travel, solar power, medicine and biotechnology. Don’t underestimate this scientific ‘genre’, if only for the fact that some estimates predict a global nanotechnology market worth more than $1 trillion (yes, trillion) in less than a decade…

Given these descriptions, for the time being it’s tempting to label nanotechnology as something of an esoteric branch of science. Until, that is, it’s likely impact is spelt out in terms of some specific losses to companies that this self-same technology might otherwise be used to confront head on.

Speaking at the ‘Nanotechnology in Crime Prevention and Detection’ Conference, Professor Keith Lewis of QinetiQ outlined how, for example, 7-8% of world trade in 2000 involved counterfeit goods such as software, videos and music CDs.

US cheque fraud alone runs at $16 billion per annum, while identity fraud using passports and driving licenses, etc offers lucrative access to credit plundering, social security scams and related areas that require far tighter loss prevention controls than presently exist.

Fellow speaker Dr Christine Eckers – team manager in the analytical sciences division at GlaxoSmithKline R&D – described the scale of pharmaceutical counterfeiting involving a variety of bogus goods originating mainly from Asia, Africa and South America in different formulations, tablets, suspensions, ear and eye drops, etc. These threaten company profits, instigate a brand protection issue and pose a serious potential health risk for their unwitting recipients – with legal, financial and moral repercussions for the genuine providers of these counterfeited products.

Nanotechnology may be an emerging science in one sense, but it can trace its origins back 150 years. That kind of timeframe has been reported by researchers working on thin film techniques in connection with cathode ray tubes. Thin films are a coating that can vary in thickness from 10 micrometres to one nanometre or less. These engineered layers may be composed of a wide variety of materials, their uses including the labelling of whisky bottles to prevent bootlegging.

In reality, a variety of optical effects can be produced, ranging from a very small image up to highly complex combinations of images that may only be seen when viewed through polarising filters. This is otherwise known as the ‘lock and key’ principle.

Dots take a quantum leap
Colour interference filters (such as the tiny squares that change colour on banknotes when viewed at certain angles) use thin film technology, too. Indeed, the difficulty in copying these filters has rendered them ideal in the fight against forgery.

New techniques involving what are known as quantum dots now offer a means of tightening this protection still further. A quantum dot is a nano-scale crystalline structure which can transform the colour of light. It may be printed onto a substrate and is invisible unless exposed to black or ultraviolet (uv) light, whereupon it fluoresces in a range of colours.

Their full manufacturing and ownership history may be printed on to cars using this technology, the information remaining invisible unless exposed under special lighting conditions. Described by Dr David Glover of Nanoco Technologies – a spin-out company of the University of Manchester – as the “ball bearings of the 21st Century” because of their exploitable electronic and colour properties, quantum dots are a protective solution with numerous applications that can be tailored in a variety of ways.

Nanoco’s proprietary expertise is described as being related to synthetic routes for nanoparticle preparation or nanoparticle synthesis. By altering the size of the core shell, Dr Glover told the assembled hordes, quantum dots have tunable optical, electronic, magnetic and catalytic properties. By way of example, he mentioned optical bar coding in terms of product authentication using tunable overt or covert features as a replacement for the fluorescent dyes presently used in banknotes.

Nanoco Technologies claims its quality control procedures ensure there’s no batch-to-batch variation in production of the material, with the wider range of colours and intensities offering a variety of other applications. A four-colour image could be produced using quantum dots in inkjet printing, while the technology might be incorporated in CD polymers as well.

Forgery-proof nanotags
Dr Russell Cowburn of the University of Durham – who presented a paper on forgery-proof nanotags for document identification – stressed that quantum dot applications include insurance certificates, machinery guarantees… even BMW brake pads!

The latter use is a topical throwback to the term ‘nanotechnology’, which was originally coined by car manufacturers in Japan who used it to refer to the elements of a vehicle engineered to tolerances on a nanoscale.

Dr Cowburn added that, by making barcodes out of magnetic metal, it’s possible to use nanotechnology to engineer the magnetic properties such that they depend – critically – on the precise position of the atomic defects in the nanostructure.

To check the authenticity of a tag, the end user would measure the properties of the nanostructures and compare them with a previously stored ‘fingerprint’. An item to be protected is tagged with a tiny plastic chip measuring just 2 mm by 0.5 mm. This chip contains a microscopic bar code which allows a unique serial number to be assigned to it.

The bars in the barcode are made of magnetic metal, the magnetic properties of those bars realising the nano-fingerprint. If the two don’t happen to correspond then the tag is immediately identified as a forgery.

Following his presentation Dr Cowburn told Security Management Today that this project – funded by Business Angels – is being readied for a commercial launch sometime this year. He’s anxious to develop the system in conjunction with interested end users, thus a production process now has to be developed to take matters on to the next stage.

Dr Stephen Haubold of German concern Nanosolutions warned starkly that approximately 13% of world trade is already lost annually through forgery. “This significant strain – in terms of both financial losses and job casualties – could be turned around into an annual sales increase of 20% by adequate protective measures,” suggested Haubold.

In his paper entitled ‘Ghost Imaging Against Forgery’, Dr Haubold describes how his company’s product – designated REN-X – is a dispersible powder that can be detected under uv light. Distributed using inkjet printers, it’s said to provide intrinsic security including a measurable spectroscopical fingerprint in the form of a barcode, for instance. Items which can be protected in this way include paintings, passports, banknotes, clothing and other textiles, CDs and even aircraft parts.

Staying with this subject, Dr Christine Eckers then discussed methods of combating harmful pharmaceutical counterfeiters. She described how a number of groups within Glaxo are involved in this important work, including corporate security investigators, packaging and intellectual property department staff. For instance, nanotext printing is now being used as a defence (consisting of a small dot with information contained inside the nanotext) together with covert links.

The latter technique entails the creation of covert coded signatures by mixing special, molecular-sized chemical markers – otherwise known as ‘taggants’ – into commercial inks and coatings. Up to 1,000 characters per square inch can be embedded, for example, using one such technology.

However, Dr Eckers warned conference delegates that costs need to be kept down when applying this leading-edge technology.

Applications in IT security
Turning to a completely different application area, Dr Andrew Shields of Toshiba Research Europe appraised delegates of his company’s work in successfully demonstrating quantum cryptography over 100 km of optical fibre.

Cryptography, explained Shields, is the science of information security – essential to the protection of electronic business communities and e-commerce. This enables, for example, confidentiality, identification of users and the validity of transactions.

Today’s computer networks distribute keys using either little encryption or a code-based technique called public key cryptography. Public key cryptography is computationally burdensome and may be broken with a sufficiently powerful computer.

To maintain security, the length of the public key used must be continually increased to keep up with hackers. The cost of using that longer key is that it slows down the speed at which public key cryptography can operate. In comparison, quantum cryptography is more secure, far more efficient and future-proof.

This solution is implemented by sending encoded single photons (‘particles’ of light) along standard telecom fibres. Due to the fact that the information is carried by a single photon, it’s claimed to be impossible for the hacker to tap in and remove part of the signal.