How Veracity Protocol protects people above ground
Veracity Protocol’s technology can secure components in the aerospace and aviation industry
Counterfeiting has a colorful history, spanning handbags to manufactured goods. Unlike other industries, inauthentic parts and components critical to the aerospace industry can have life or death consequences.
Counterfeit aircraft parts are usually made of low quality materials, manufactured within inadequate processes and aren’t tested properly. Such parts are only designed to resemble genuine parts. Inauthentic components are cheap to buy, far more profitable to sell than authentic ones, and have become nearly impossible to distinguish from originals. They may look identical, but the counterfeit has a much greater risk of failure.
Faulty parts have been found in both civilian and military aircrafts, causing hundreds of incidents and crashes, some being fatal. From 2010 and 2016, there have been about 24 crashes that killed seven people and injured 18. The Department of Defense (DOD) and contractors submitted 526 suspect counterfeit parts reports in the Government-Industry Data Exchange Program (GIDEP) from years 2011 through 2015.
The agency responsible for ensuring airline safety is not doing its job properly.
According to an article by The Crime Report, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) — the agency responsible for ensuring airline safety — had consistently failed to alert federal law enforcement authorities about suspicious parts installed in U.S. airplanes. The agency was also accused of closing investigations without ensuring that counterfeit and improperly manufactured parts were removed. The FAA’s process for monitoring and investigating is not as effective as it could be, due in part to weaknesses in recordkeeping and inaccurate reporting of unapproved parts.
A wave of defective and possibly counterfeit airplane parts has been making its way into U.S. aircrafts unreported and unchecked. Airlines have been hesitant to investigate whether the parts they acquire are authentic or not. When counterfeits are discovered, airline officials can choose not to undertake the expense and difficulty of replacing them. As a result, much of the information we have about inauthentic airplane parts result from investigations into counterfeits sold to the U.S. military.
Every aerospace manufacturer is at risk
The growing pervasion of counterfeit parts in the industry means that every aerospace manufacturer is at risk. According to a report by the Aerospace Industries Association, the supply chain suffers if counterfeit parts, whether they’re electronic, mechanical or whatnot, make their way into stock and within the aircraft. It brings security and safety risks, increased costs to minimize risk and replace failed parts, reputational damage and more.
As supply chains became a global network in itself, it became hard to monitor patent and trademark violations. Manufacturers started using product identifiers such as barcodes, holographic stickers, and chips, but such efforts no longer provide full protection against counterfeiting.
Many external identifiers are printed on or attached to product packages.
Fraudsters remove original products, place their fake products in the original packaging, and use a similar sealant.
Even if identifiers are added to the product itself by engraving barcodes or using hologram stickers, they are not unique to each product, which leaves room for counterfeiters to manufacture low-quality counterfeit products and use similar identifiers. Most end-consumers do not have the tools or expertise to verify the authenticity of the identifier.
How Veracity Protocol can help
Veracity Protocol can secure genuine parts, avert the introduction of counterfeit parts into the aerospace supply chain, and allow the unprecedented track & trace of any component. We have one simple goal — to protect human lives.
Every aircraft component has its own unique material structure and manufacturing characteristics. Using any camera (including smartphones), we capture these characteristics and create a tamper-proof Physical Code™. This allows anyone to verify an item’s identity, authenticity, detect anomalies, and even check for tampering. Nobody can counterfeit, change or tamper with the Physical Code™ because it’s based on an item’s unique material structure — unlike tags, chips or markers.
For mass-scale protection, we use a Batch Protection approach to protect items on a product line-basis. To create a Batch Physical Code™, we train our algorithm by capturing a few dozen samples of genuine parts, which would later allow anyone to check whether they come from the actual manufacturer, and ultimately determine if it is safe to use. This can all be done with a smartphone camera.
One thing is for sure, counterfeit parts and other types of unapproved parts are not going away. Here’s to hoping the industry will implement effective countermeasures to properly mitigate this issue.
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Veracity Protocol is an award-winning startup that builds a Vision AI Standard to protect people and products in the digital world. The standard guarantees the highest level of trust and security for verifying the identity, authenticity, and integrity of physical objects using a smartphone.
