Ethicronics certification sets out to identify counterfeit electronics

Counterfeit electronic goods entering the UK is an ongoing challenge and being able to stop this threat would be a significant step in the right direction, says Ethicronics CEO and founder Franck Courbon.

Trading Standards has reported that over 4 million counterfeit products across all sectors breached the IP of legitimate businesses in the 2021-2022 financial year, worth an estimated £111m.

The goal for Ethicronics is to stop fake, compromised (and unsustainable) electronics - for good.

The start-up emerged from Franck’s background as a security engineer working for Gemalto (now Thales) in France, before coming to Cambridge as a post doctoral research associate at Cambridge University’s Department of Computer Science and Technology (DCST) in 2015. In 2017 he became a Leverhulme early career fellow. By 2020 he was an affiliated lecturer and in 2021 he became the Physical Attacks and Supply chain Security (PASS) project leader supported by an EPRSC Impact Acceleration Account Partnership Award (and a private sponsor), all within the DCST.

“EPSRC projects can be for people interested in starting their own firm,” Franck says over coffee in a cafe on Mill Road. “So Ethicronics started in June 2022 and I went full time in November 2022. Summer 2022 we were awarded an Innovate UK grant, for £50k.”

Based at Allia’s Cambridge Guildhall hub, Ethicronics has a double mission.

“Cybersecurity is the first selling point,” says Dr Courbon. “That means no more fake or compromised electronics.

“The second is greener electronics, 75 per cent of the carbon footprint of your phone is generated before it reaches your pocket. So we want to make people aware of that – and other aspects of the sustainable economy.”

Making counterfeit electronics is big business, he adds.

“Fake electronics is bigger than fake clothing or fake cosmetics. There’s £2.5bn of fake electrical devices entering the UK every year – worldwide it’s £77bn a year.

“The products, including logos and branding, can be replicated by these illegal traders. With printer cartridges, for instance, they can build a new chip – the printer and cartridge has an authentication chip in between the two – and they can build that in a matter of days.”

So who’s doing this? Franck isn’t keen to point the finger but here’s a clue: 80 per cent of the world’s counterfeits originate from China, according to research by Daxue Consulting.

“The big manufacturers can lose tens of millions of pounds of revenue from this,” Franck continues. “We aim to provide full assurance for the hardware and we can protect it for good.”

Franck, who recently pitched to enter the selective National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) for Startups program in Cheltenham, identifies fake electronics products as one aspect of the criminality, and “compromised electronics where it’s been tampered with or modified” as another.

He adds: “On a printed circuit board, you could programme the device to cause trouble – you might do a denial of service, or extract data from a router. You can modify at low level – nanometer level – as well.”

So these fake devices could syphon off data as well?

“Once the hardware is modified, there is no more security,” Franck replies. “Yesterday, at a CW presentation [‘Security vulnerabilities in critical national infrastructure’ on June 1], a speaker mentioned the possibility to hack a DNA synthesis company by inserting malware by the sequence that is read– and it’s scaleable.”

He accepts some of the challenges will be politically-motivated legislation.

“I do believe we can know what is inside each device at hardware and software level, but there is tension – for instance [US chip maker] Micron recently got banned in China.

“It’s not only a technical problem. You need to think why this is happening, but I do believe we can introduce, a natural, transparent and robust solution, including by partnering with different companies.”

He adds: “I think we can have impact. This [product] is a way to ensure everything is correct. We think we can also impact on the greener side. The main product is on the cybersecurity side. You install it and it says whether the device is clean, yes or no. We can qualify or test the hardware at scale. It’s a turnkey solution across various segments.”

The first Ethicronics product is expected to be launched next year.