Your Product Ownership, Finally Unforgeable
Key Takeaways
- Paper warranty cards, email confirmations, and screenshots are all forgeable — the mechanisms manufacturers rely on to verify ownership are fundamentally broken.
- Passkey-bound ownership records are cryptographically unforgeable: to prove ownership, a customer authenticates with their biometric, not a document that can be copied or forwarded.
- FIDO2/WebAuthn passkeys eliminate warranty fraud (which costs 3–10% of warranty budgets), enable verified secondhand market transactions, and allow ownership to transfer cleanly across resale, gifting, and fleet handover.
- BrandedMark is the only connected product platform implementing passkey-native ownership — making this a genuine, defensible differentiator with no current competitor equivalent.
A customer calls your warranty line. They've lost the product. They have a screenshot of a confirmation email, forwarded from a friend. They know the model number. They even know the serial number, because it's printed on the box they photographed. Your claims team has no way to know whether this person ever owned this product. They process the claim anyway.
This is not a fringe scenario. It is a daily reality for every manufacturer running warranty programmes at scale. And it is not primarily a fraud problem — it is an identity problem. The documents and credentials your business uses to establish product ownership were never designed to be unforgeable. They were designed to be convenient.
Paper warranty cards can be photocopied. Retailer receipts can be digitally altered. Email confirmations can be forwarded to anyone. Screenshots are trivially faked. Even account-based ownership — "log in and we'll know who you are" — is broken, because accounts can be shared, transferred, and sold along with the product without your knowledge.
Ownership verification, as an industry, has been an unsolved problem. Until now.
The Forgery Problem Is Structural, Not Accidental
To understand why passkeys matter for product ownership, you first need to understand why everything else fails. It is not that manufacturers have been negligent. It is that all existing ownership signals are fundamentally transferable.
Paper warranty cards: A physical card included in the box, typically filled out and mailed in — or more recently, a URL on the card. Anyone who has the card can register the warranty. The person holding the card is assumed to be the owner. That assumption is wrong every time a product changes hands.
Email confirmations: An email sent to an address after purchase. Forwarding the email is a one-second operation. Worse, the email address itself proves nothing about who physically bought or currently possesses the product — it proves only that someone entered that address into a form.
Retailer receipts: Subject to editing in any image tool. The industry has known this for years and has generally responded by adding more friction (call centre verification, photo requirements, multiple proof submissions) — all of which degrades the customer experience for legitimate claimants while determined fraudsters simply provide better-quality fakes.
Account-based ownership: The most sophisticated current approach, but still transferable. Accounts are shared between household members, sold in secondhand markets alongside the product ("account included"), and sometimes maintained by the original buyer long after the product has been resold. Your system records an account; it does not record a person.
The pattern is clear. Every current ownership mechanism is based on something that can be separated from the person: a piece of paper, a message, a login credential. None of them bind ownership to an individual in any meaningful sense.
Passkeys change the model entirely.
What Makes Passkeys Different
Passkeys are the consumer implementation of the FIDO2/WebAuthn cryptographic standard. The full technical detail is covered in our piece on passkeys and product identity. For ownership verification purposes, what matters is this single property: a passkey is bound to a specific device and authenticated with a biometric.
When a customer registers a product using a passkey, the ownership record is created with a cryptographic signature from their device. To prove that ownership later — to make a warranty claim, to transfer the product, to authenticate for support — they must be present, with their device, and must pass biometric authentication (fingerprint, face recognition, or device PIN).
This is not an incremental security improvement. It is a different category of proof.
You cannot forward a biometric. You cannot screenshot it. You cannot photocopy it or edit it in an image tool. The cryptographic proof of ownership can only be produced by the person who registered the product, using the device that holds the passkey. To impersonate that ownership, an attacker would need physical possession of the device, and the ability to pass its biometric authentication — a threat model that is orders of magnitude harder to execute than "forward this email."
The practical result: for the first time, manufacturers can issue warranty claims, process transfers, and handle support interactions with confidence that the person in front of them is who they say they are.
Warranty Fraud Prevention: The Direct Financial Case
Warranty fraud costs manufacturers between 3% and 10% of their total warranty budgets annually. For a mid-sized manufacturer running a £40M warranty programme, that is £1.2M to £4M per year leaving the business as fraudulent claims.
The breakdown of how fraud enters the system tracks directly to the forgery vulnerabilities described above:
- Duplicate claims: The same product registered multiple times across different accounts, by different household members or resale buyers, each making separate claims.
- Forwarded eligibility: A warranty confirmation email passed to someone who purchased secondhand, but whose purchase is not eligible under the original warranty terms.
- Out-of-period claims: Claims submitted using documentation from a product purchased before the current owner acquired it, with the original purchase date used to manufacture eligibility.
- Non-owner claims: Claims submitted by someone with access to account credentials, not the current product owner.
Passkey-bound ownership addresses all four categories at the authentication layer, before the claim is even processed. The claimant must prove, cryptographically, that they are the registered owner. If they registered using a passkey, that proof requires their physical device and biometric — not a forwarded email or a borrowed account login.
For manufacturers who use serial-level tracking to combat warranty fraud, passkeys add the missing human-identity layer: you know not just which product is being claimed, but whether the person claiming it can cryptographically prove they own it.
Secondhand Market Trust: Verified Ownership Changes the Resale Equation
The secondhand market for durable goods — appliances, power tools, consumer electronics, fitness equipment — is growing. Buyers in that market face a consistent problem: they cannot verify that the seller actually owns the product they are selling.
This uncertainty depresses secondhand prices (buyers factor in the risk of an invalid warranty or a disputed ownership history), enables a cottage industry of reselling stolen goods, and creates friction that reduces market efficiency for legitimate transactions.
Passkey-bound ownership creates a verification layer that secondhand platforms and private buyers have never had before. Before completing a purchase, a buyer can request that the seller prove ownership through a cryptographic challenge — initiated via the product's digital experience, completed with the seller's biometric authentication.
The seller's device produces a cryptographic proof. The buyer sees confirmation: this person is the registered owner of this specific unit. Not because they have an email. Not because they have a receipt. Because their biometric authenticated against the ownership record.
This is meaningfully different from anything secondhand markets currently offer. For B2B equipment resale in particular — where the stakes are higher and the frauds are more elaborate — cryptographic ownership verification transforms what is currently a trust problem into a solved problem.
Ownership Transfer Done Right
Selling or gifting a product under the current model involves one of two outcomes: the warranty either lapses entirely, or the original owner does something informal (shares account credentials, forwards a confirmation email) that is neither secure nor officially recognised by the manufacturer.
Neither outcome is good for the customer or the brand. Customers who cannot transfer their warranty cleanly are less likely to recommend the product. Manufacturers who have no record of transfers are servicing products with no visibility into current ownership.
Passkey-based ownership transfer changes this. The model works as follows:
- The current owner initiates a transfer through the product's digital experience, authenticating with their passkey to prove they hold current ownership rights.
- The new owner is invited to accept the transfer, authenticating with their own passkey to establish the new ownership record.
- The manufacturer's system records a clean transfer event: previous owner, new owner, timestamp, cryptographic proof from both parties.
The result is an auditable ownership chain. Every transfer is recorded with biometric-authenticated consent from both parties. The manufacturer always knows who currently owns the product. The new owner receives full warranty benefits (subject to the manufacturer's transfer policy). No credentials are shared. No emails are forwarded. The previous owner's access is revoked cleanly.
For fleet management scenarios — a business handing over tools to new employees, a rental company cycling assets, a dealer refurbishing and reselling equipment — this ownership chain is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundational record of asset management.
Beyond Warranty: Insurance, Recalls, and Fleet Management
The value of unforgeable ownership extends well beyond warranty claims.
Insurance claims: Proving ownership for an insurance claim currently requires a receipt, a warranty card, or — increasingly commonly — a manual review process where adjusters call manufacturers to attempt to verify serial numbers against purchase records that may not exist. Passkey-bound ownership gives insurers an instant, cryptographic proof of ownership that is more reliable than any paper documentation. A policyholder can prove they owned the product before the theft or damage with a biometric authentication, not a document that could have been created after the event.
Recall compliance: Product recalls have historically low completion rates — industry averages are in the 15–30% range — because manufacturers cannot reliably reach current owners. They can reach original purchasers whose addresses are on file. But products move. They are resold, gifted, inherited. The person holding the affected product is often not the person in the manufacturer's system. With passkey-bound ownership and tracked transfers, recall notifications go to the current owner, not the original buyer. The product recall management problem — reaching the right person, not just the original one — is fundamentally a product of broken ownership records. Fix the records, and you fix the reach.
Fleet handover: Enterprise customers managing equipment fleets — construction, healthcare, logistics, facilities management — need auditable custody records. Who held this asset, from when to when, and with what authorisation? Current processes involve spreadsheets, asset tags, and manual sign-off procedures that are time-consuming and error-prone. Passkey-authenticated ownership transfer creates a cryptographic custody chain as a natural by-product of the handover process.
Why No Competitor Has This Yet
The connected product platform market has been building features for over a decade. Warranty registration, QR-linked experiences, digital product passports, scan analytics — these are now commoditised capabilities. The platforms that offer them are competing on UI, integrations, and price.
Nobody has built passkey-native product ownership. There are several reasons for this.
First, the FIDO2/WebAuthn standards only reached the maturity required for this kind of implementation relatively recently. The infrastructure — platform-level passkey support on iOS, Android, and Windows — has only been broadly available since 2022–2023. Most connected product platforms were designed before this infrastructure existed, and rearchitecting authentication is hard.
Second, the use case is genuinely novel. Passkeys were designed for website and app authentication. Applying them to physical product ownership requires thinking through a set of problems — transfer flows, shared-household ownership, device loss scenarios — that nobody has had to solve before. The path from "passkeys are available" to "passkeys-as-ownership-proof" requires product thinking, not just technical integration.
Third, and most practically: most connected product platforms are not in the business of thinking about ownership. They are in the business of warranty registration UX and post-purchase content delivery. Ownership verification — who actually owns this product right now — has not been their problem to solve.
BrandedMark is building this as a core capability, not an add-on. The wallet integration layer that connects passkey ownership to Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes extends this further: the owner's phone carries a cryptographically-backed proof of ownership that works offline, in any service context, without requiring an app or an active internet connection.
FAQ
Is passkey-bound ownership difficult for end customers to use?
No. Passkeys use the biometric authentication that customers already use to unlock their phones — fingerprint or face recognition. From the customer's perspective, proving ownership is a one-tap interaction. The cryptographic complexity is entirely invisible. Compare this to current alternatives: finding a receipt, locating a warranty card, accessing an account they may have forgotten. Passkeys are not just more secure — they are dramatically simpler.
What happens if a customer loses their phone?
Passkeys sync across devices via platform credential managers — iCloud Keychain for Apple devices, Google Password Manager for Android. A customer who replaces their phone recovers their passkeys automatically through the account restore process. For cases where a customer has lost access to their device and their cloud credentials simultaneously, BrandedMark provides an ownership recovery flow using purchase verification as a fallback, with the recovered ownership re-bound to a new passkey.
Does this work for products that are genuinely shared — a household appliance used by multiple family members?
Yes. The model supports multiple authorised owners or users linked to a single product registration. A primary owner registers with their passkey and can authorise additional household members. For warranty and ownership purposes, any authorised user can authenticate. For ownership transfer, only the primary owner can initiate a transfer — preventing scenarios where a secondary user transfers a product without the primary owner's knowledge.
How does this interact with existing warranty terms — many of which are non-transferable?
The passkey ownership system records transfers without mandating any particular warranty policy. Manufacturers set their own transfer eligibility rules: whether warranties transfer at all, whether a fee applies, whether eligibility resets on transfer. The system enforces those rules at the point of transfer, so a customer cannot inadvertently transfer warranty eligibility that the manufacturer's terms do not permit. Crucially, the system also enables manufacturers to offer transfer-eligible warranties as a premium feature — which has demonstrable secondhand market value.
Are there EU Digital Product Passport or compliance implications?
Yes, positively. The EU ESPR framework requires Digital Product Passports to carry verified product information and support ownership tracking across the product lifecycle. Passkey-bound ownership provides a standards-compliant mechanism for the ownership and custody chain that DPP regulations increasingly require. Manufacturers implementing BrandedMark for DPP compliance get ownership verification as part of the same platform, rather than having to solve it separately.
Ownership has always been the weak link in the connected product stack. Manufacturers invested in the registration experience, the digital content, the QR infrastructure — but the underlying proof of ownership remained a piece of paper, a forwarded email, an account that could belong to anyone.
The cryptographic tools to fix this have existed for several years. The platform thinking to apply them to physical product ownership is what has been missing. That is the gap BrandedMark is closing — and it is a gap that, once closed, is not easy for competitors to replicate.
The question for manufacturers is not whether unforgeable ownership verification will become standard. It is whether you will have it before your warranty fraud losses fund the next year of building it.
Explore how BrandedMark's passkey-native ownership layer works alongside digital product identity and wallet-integrated ownership passes to create a complete post-purchase ownership experience.