WISeKey Strengthens it Semiconductors NFC Brand Protection Related Patent Portfolio in China

WISeKey has been granted two fundamental patents about Semiconductors NFC tag design in China, which protect the company’s unique IP in the area of product authenticity verification and customer engagement.

Geneva, Switzerland – July 13, 2021: WISeKey International Holding Ltd. (“WISeKey”) (SIX: WIHN, NASDAQ: WKEY), a leading global cybersecurity and IoT company today announced it has been granted two new patents by the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) that protect inventions in the domain of NFC tags for smart packaging, brand protection and customer engagement applications.

WISeKey has designed its NanoSeal® and VaultIC® lines of secure NFC chips that can be attached to any brand product for unmatched security, cloud-based authentication, traceability, and consumer engagement. The cryptographic functions of these WISeKey’s NFC chips, integrated with the complete WISeAuthentic ecosystem, offer an efficient way for brands to replace traditional non-secure QR code scanning or basic NFC tags. Moreover, the featured tamper detection sensors combined with single-tap Android and iOS compatibility, extends the possibilities and disrupts direct-to-consumer digital strategies.

Various industries already benefit from this ecosystem including fashion & sports apparel, cosmetics, wines & spirits, consumer products, medicines and luxury goods.

The original tamper detection sensors play a pivotal role in WISeKey’s proposed enriched customer experience: upon the status of these sensors, the brand’s messaging to the consumer can be adapted, giving packaging some intelligence.

Both new WISeKey’s Chinese patents cover this feature. To summarize:

• Patent referenced CN106797235B describes a method to keep the NFC tag alive when the package has been opened, making it able to detect the opening and to adapt its behavior accordingly;
• Patent referenced CN108713292B describes a method to reliably place such NFC tags with open detection on any packaging, including on bottles. WISeKey’s CapSeal Top tags are direct applications of this patent.

“As reported in the newly released CNIPA 2020 Annual Report, there were a total of 1.497 million patents filed in China in 2020, among which 89.8% were about domestic inventions. In the same year,
530,000 patents were granted with 83.1% of the total being domestic ones,” said Carlos Moreira, Founder and CEO of WISeKey. “China is a very inventive country. Getting two patents simultaneously granted there testifies WISeKey’s employees are, too. Because we have significant Chinese subcontractors and customers, and because we are investing a big portion of our revenue in R&D (40% in 2020) to provide our customers with the best cybersecurity, patents filing in China is not an option for WISeKey.”

To learn more about WISeKey’s Intellectual Properties, visit WISeKey’s IPs.
To learn more about WISeKey’s Brand Protection Solutions, visit WISeKey’s Brand Protection.

About WISeKey

WISeKey (NASDAQ: WKEY; SIX Swiss Exchange: WIHN) is a leading global cybersecurity company currently deploying large scale digital identity ecosystems for people and objects using Blockchain, AI and IoT respecting the Human as the Fulcrum of the Internet. WISeKey microprocessors secure the pervasive computing shaping today’s Internet of Everything. WISeKey IoT has an install base of over 1.5 billion microchips in virtually all IoT sectors (connected cars, smart cities, drones, agricultural sensors, anti-counterfeiting, smart lighting, servers, computers, mobile phones, crypto tokens etc.).  WISeKey is uniquely positioned to be at the edge of IoT as our semiconductors produce a huge amount of Big Data that, when analyzed with Artificial Intelligence (AI), can help industrial applications to predict the failure of their equipment before it happens.

Our technology is Trusted by the OISTE/WISeKey’s Swiss based cryptographic Root of Trust (“RoT”) provides secure authentication and identification, in both physical and virtual environments, for the Internet of Things, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence. The WISeKey RoT serves as a common trust anchor to ensure the integrity of online transactions among objects and between objects and people. For more information, visit www.wisekey.com.

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