What is "taggant"

n. That which serves as a tag, such as an identification microchip or a chemical or physical marker.

A taggant can mean a radio frequency microchip used in automated identification and data capture (see RFID). In such cases, electronic devices use radio waves to track and identify items, such as pharmaceutical products, by assigning individual serial numbers to the containers holding each product. This technology may prevent the diversion or counterfeiting of drugs by allowing wholesalers and pharmacists to determine the identity and dosage of individual products.

A taggant is also a chemical or physical marker added to materials to allow various forms of testing. Physical taggants can take many different forms but are typically microscopic in size, included at low levels, and simple to detect. They can be utilized to differentiate authentic product from counterfeits, provide identifying information for traceability purposes (e.g. lot number, company name), determine mixing homogeneity & cross-contamination, and to detect dilution of proprietary products. Taggants are known to be widely used in the animal feed industry, plastics, inks, sheet and flexible explosives, and pharmaceuticals.

A software taggant is a cryptographic signature added to software that enables positive origin identification and integrity of programs. Software taggants are using standard PKI techniques (see Public key infrastructure) and were introduced by the Industry Connections Security Group of IEEE in an attempt to control proliferation of malware obfuscated via executable compression.