Patent 11302016 was granted and assigned to NEC on April, 2022 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The present invention addresses the problem of providing a technique for determining the authenticity of a product without requiring a special device such as an integrated circuit (IC) tag. A means for solving this problem according to the invention is characterized by determining the authenticity of a target product on the basis of the validity of the association between the body of the product and a surface-treated component that is mounted to the body and that has been validated.