Tech Giant IBM on Tuesday predicted that within the next five years, cryptographic anchors such as ink dots, or tiny computers smaller than a grain of salt, will be embedded to tackle issues such as counterfeit and food safety among others.
Cryptographic anchors will be used in tandem with blockchain’s distributed ledger technology to ensure an object’s authenticity
“These technologies pave the way for solutions that tackle food safety, authenticity of manufactured components, genetically modified products, identification of counterfeit objects and provenance of luxury goods, it added.
Fraud costs the global economy more than $ 600 billion a year.
“Complex supply chains -- comprised of dozens of suppliers in multiple countries -- make it difficult to prevent bad actors from tampering with everything
“Blockchain technology is poised as the future of digital transactions, infusing trust, efficiency and transparency into supply chains. But blockchains alone cannot ensureauthenticity of physical goods,
IBM unveiled five technologies that would reshape business and society in the next five years.
Arvind Krishna, Head of IBM Research, said the company believes these technologies are being developed aiming at solving societal problems.
In five years, small, autonomous AI microscopes, networked in the cloud and deployed around the world, will continually monitor in real time the health of one of Earth’s most important and threatened resources -- water, it said.
The IBM scientists are working on an approach that uses plankton, which are natural, biological sensors of aquatic health. The technology would be helpful in situations like oil spills and runoff from land-based pollution sources, and to predict threats such as red tides, IBM said.
Already they have developed a post-quantum encryption method, which is submitted to the US government — called lattice cryptography.