You have a live tag: the one you just wrote, or one from a demo kit, an order, or a tagged product. Time to verify it the way every customer will. Any NFC-enabled phone works, yours or a colleague’s, and everything happens in the browser. The phone is the only tool you need.
Find your phone’s NFC reader
- iPhone (iOS 13+): the reader is at the very top. Hold the top edge over the tag.
- Android: the antenna is usually centre-back, but varies by model. If nothing happens, move the phone slowly across the back of the product.
If NFC is turned off, enable it in your phone’s settings.
If you are signed in to the dashboard on this phone, a tap on one of your own tags opens its edit form instead of the check below. Press Continue to Verification Page there, or sign out, to see what your customer sees.
First tap: start verification
Hold the phone to the tag until a browser page opens. You’ll see a prompt to tap again. This first tap starts the check, and it does not confirm authenticity yet.
Second tap: confirm
Tap the same tag again within a few minutes. This completes the check: TAGBASE confirms the tag is genuine, live hardware.
Read the result
- Authentic: the tag is genuine and the product is real.
- Not authentic: the second tap repeated the proof from the first. Copied and tampered tags fail here.
On a genuine tag, the product page opens with the product’s photos and details, and the result reads Authentic:
What just happened
Each tap makes the tag build fresh proof of itself, and it never builds the same proof twice. The proof from your two taps is what TAGBASE compares.
The first tap opens a pending verification
The page the tag opens carries proof that a genuine tag produced it. TAGBASE
checks that proof, finds the tag in your account, and records the tap as
pending. The page shows no verdict yet, because one proof on its own says
little. Anybody who taps a real product can capture the proof that came out of
it.
The second tap has to bring new proof
Within a few minutes, the same tag has to produce a second proof, newer than the
first one. That is the part a copy cannot do. New proof moves the verification
to valid and the page turns green. The same proof a second time ends the
session as invalid.
The window is short on purpose, ten minutes by default. Somebody can capture the proof from a genuine product and pass it around, and it runs out of time long before it helps anybody sell a fake.
Where a copy fails
A copied tag is a recording. Somebody taps a genuine product, captures the proof it produced, and writes that one proof onto a cheap tag or prints it as a QR code. The copy gets past the first tap, because that proof was real at the moment somebody captured it. It fails the second tap, because a recording plays back what it already holds.
A printed code carries the same weakness, however long or unique you make it. Print holds one value for good, so whoever photographs it holds that value too. Hardware that answers differently on every tap is what proves the product is in your customer’s hand.
Where the check runs
All of it runs on TAGBASE servers. The phone opens an ordinary web page, and neither the page nor the browser holds a key. A tampered phone can change what your customer sees on screen. The verdict in your dashboard comes from our servers either way.
When a scan does not turn green
- Not authentic. The second tap replayed the proof from the first. Treat the item as suspect and check the entry in your verifications list for the place and time.
- The page asks for a first tap again. More than ten minutes passed between the taps, so the pending verification timed out. Tap twice in a row and the check completes normally.
- Nothing opens at all. NFC is off, or the phone’s reader is not over the tag. The tap never reaches TAGBASE, so nothing shows up in the dashboard.
The security model covers the full threat model, including the tamper seal and the signals we collect on every tap.
That’s the whole loop, and TAGBASE recorded it: every scan of your tags shows up in the dashboard, live.
Next: using the dashboard.