Exposing Vulnerabilities in Counterfeit Prevention Systems Utilizing Physically Unclonable Surface Features

Counterfeit products pose significant risks to public health and safety through infiltrating untrusted supply chains. Among numerous anti-counterfeiting techniques, leveraging inherent, unclonable microscopic irregularities of paper surfaces is an accurate and cost-effective solution. Prior work of this approach has focused on enabling ubiquitous acquisition of these physically unclonable features (PUFs). However, we will show that existing authentication methods relying on paper surface PUFs may be vulnerable to adversaries, resulting in a gap between technological feasibility and secure real-world deployment. This gap is investigated through formalizing an operational framework for paper-PUF-based authentication. Informed by this framework, we reveal system-level vulnerabilities across both physical and digital domains, designing physical denial-of-service and digital forgery attacks to disrupt proper authentication. The effectiveness of the designed attacks underscores the strong need for security countermeasures for reliable and resilient authentication based on paper PUFs. The proposed framework further facilitates a comprehensive, stage-by-stage security analysis, guiding the design of future counterfeit prevention systems. This analysis delves into potential attack strategies, offering a foundational understanding of how various system components, such as physical features and verification processes, might be exploited by adversaries.