Slashdot Mirror
Polarized Screens to Hide Sensitive Data
NiugMan writes "NewScientist.com reports that Iizuka Denki Kogyo, a Tokio-based tech company has developed a monitor which appears to be blank if you stare at it with your eyes. Only by wearing a pair of polarised glasses you see stuff on it. The idea is to protect sensitive data from unauthorised personnel. Please take your special glasses with you when you take a coffee-break."
Someone warn these guys before they are locked away for selling hacking tools.
It can be defeated with 3-d glasses?
How about normal, polarized sunglasses and someone who can rotate their head?
Me thinks someone spent too much on research for this one.
OBEY!
CONSUME!
MARRY AND REPRODUCE!
(also, remember to stock up on bubblegum)
"Why in the hell is my computer always turned off when I get back from taking a leak?"
"I don't know, Bob. I had to look at it for something, it was off, and I tried to turn it on, but all that happened was that "power" light turned off."
Yeah. Brilliant idea.
Would it be possible for the glasses to be polarized with a private key, and have the monitor polarize with the corresponding public key?
I remember IBM selling Thinkpads (amongst other manufacturers) with such screens back around 1995 or so. One of the suggested purposes was for using the computer on a plane, so that people behind you wouldn't be able to see what you're looking at. However, anyone who really needs to spy on someone using one of these computers would only have to go to a camera shoppe and buy a telephoto lens with a polarising filter.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Of course, anybody with a proper camera may be able to take photographs from your screen.
Most people with expensive camera equipment add a polarizing filter to their glassware in order to protect the lens. The filter will kill some nasty reflections and improve colors, and is much cheaper to replace than the actual unprotected lens should it become scratched.
Now you have to find a way so that your data can't show up on a normal monitor and you've got an effective defence, Aganst at least the low end script kiddie type hacker that has trouble affording pricy hardware upgrades.
Never Underestimate A Human Being
Funny how we had these at General Dynamics back in 1989 on our Wyse 55 terminals. you wore these funky old-people (tm) style lightly tinted sunglasses to see the screen.. it was for really basic security to stop the casual passer-by.. I remember figuring out the polarization angle needed to get a decent looking pair of glasses made for myself so I didnt look as geeky as the rest of the people there using those 5 terminals.
Really old tech... and as secure as a wet paper bag.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Kuhn adds that an opaque shielding device might be simpler way to obstruct prying eyes.
I wonder if he has a patent on this idea. Wouldn't it just be better to have people in, I dunno, offices? You could control entry via special security signatures know as "keys," which would be small metal devices small enough to fit into your hand. Access to data would be protected by an "opaque shielding device" called a wall.
I'll take my consulting check now, please.
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
Second, how many different polarizations are there ? Last time I studied optics, one pair of glasses will work on any of these monitors (maybe needing some rotation/tilting). Unless you can assure polarizing glasses will always be bright red so you recognize "people with bright red glasses coming near my computer", and you can't assure that - it's quite easy to make polarizing lenses - the protection is senseless.
I can hardly wait until some company buys monitors and glasses to all their employees and then put several monitors in the same room, all people with polarizing glasses, making the whole buy futile. (Hmm, ok, will prevent the floor sweeper from reading your screen. Great.)
As others have pointed out, polarizing filters are so common that there's no security here.
It's like locking your house with a skeleton key.
Why not insert noisy frames between real ones and just synchronize the glasses so that they filter out the garbage frames? Why not just have the screen in the glasses?
I read about this a long, long time ago (I can't remember when, but it is on the order of years). It was a mod that a company was selling for business people's laptops. They'd strip off the polarizing film from the laptop's LCD panel, and then you could only see what was on the screen through polarizing glasses.
;)
I'm not sure whether the glasses required were vertically polarized of horizontally polarized. If they were vertically polarized, anyone with a pair of sunglasses could quite easily read the screen (but wouldn't you look odd wearing sunglasses on a plane while staring at a business person's apparently blank laptop screen).
On the other hand, if the required glasses were horizontally polarized, you'd have to rotate the sunglass lenses 90 degrees (which, since most sunglass lenses do not posess rotational symmetry, would mean you either would have a serious mod coming, or else you'd just have to tip your head 90 degrees... Actually, this might just work, but only if you were pretending to sleep and laying your head on the business person's shoulder, and that's likely to just make them upset.
> The cost of polarized system is too high
> and is certainly not justified.
Actually, all LCD monitors *already* have the capability built in. The way they work is by using the polarization of light. All you have to do to make one of these "secure" panels that can only be viewed through polarized glasses is *remove* the polarizing film from the monitor.
Put simply, it should not be much more expensive to *leave out* part of the panel, eh?
I remeber this technology as well. I believe it was being pushed in laptops at the time. The goal was to block nosy people behind or aside you on an airplane or park bench. Perhaps they're banking on a post-9/11 paranoid public to embrace their unappealing technology the second time around?
This is such a useless security measure. It can be defeated by anyone wearing polarized lenses, and such lenses are worn innocuously all the time so you couldn't accuse someone of spying just for wearing them. And what scenario is this supposed to be useful for? An environment where the display is visible to untrusted viewers -- public places, mostly. In an office you get better security by locking the doors. But in a public place you have no control over who wears sunglasses, so anyone who wants to see the screen can easily do so. It's just stupid.
My deviantArt site
what about that white van that's always outside? can they still see it, too? (hi guys! there's a pizza special down the street today!)
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I just love the cost of these monitors ...
...
...
Um, put a polarizing filter on the monitor, add a simple 90 degress polarized light source to the front of the monitor (translucent sheet) put on your polarized glasses and you are set.
Sounds like bad security practices to me
Btw. The gentle fisher folks have been using polarized sunglasses for spotting trout for years
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
In particular, if you have a 505tx, or similar laptop, download CCS (the c64 emulator) and play M.U.L.E. and try to find the mountains. There's a way to change color settings, but It's not high on my priority list, yet, to figure out.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Will people see believable, but wrong data if they tilt their head wrong? Will every workstation have a different 'correct' polarized plane? If they did display bogus data on bad planes, how would the government worker know if he saw the bogus data or the stuff he was supposed to be working on?
...and people with those polarized driving glasses, I imagine.
I suspect it would work, but it's just a hunch.
If the screen could alternate between two different polarizations, which the glasses have lenses for (one on each eye), then this could be used for 3-D imaging. All we have to do is call the glasses "goggles" and we might as well be in Snow Crash.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
I remember, back in the PC boom when Gateway was running those ads in Computer Shopper soap-opera style, that someone came up with a similar idea.
The laptop computer had just gotten usable (sort of), and business users were taking work on the road. Normally the cube jungle and office walls are fine to protect data from prying eyes, but laptop screens were a real concern.
The solution was...a solution, which you wiped onto your laptop screen, intended to strip off the last polarizing layer. This last layer is what made sense of the supertwist LCD displays. The kit came with a pair of polarized glasses to prevent anyone else from seeing your screen; to them, it looked like a blank white display. Of course they addressed the issue of normal polarized sunglasses allowing circumvention...their glasses needed to be polarized at right angles to normal sunglass polarization. Of course this doesn't keep people with normal sunglasses from simply rotating the glasses, or their head, 90 degrees.
I never saw the point. Once enough people have the glasses, it's just like having an open display again, except less convenient to use.
There's a reason it never took off in the years since it was first invented.
...
Price of the monitors: between $1600 and $2500.
Price of polarizing glasses: $15.
Everybody rotfl: priceless !
Otherwise, as soon as you have two or more of these monitors, all the people with glasses that are authorized to see screen A will also be able to see everything on screen B. Which makes it kind of pointless, right?
Working in the IT Dept. of a bank, I can see how this could possibly appeal to the decision makers in the bank, and the industry at large.
Privacy is big in banking. Bigger than big. There is nothing more important that people's money, and there are enough federal guidelines and regulations on the subject to choke a horse. People can argue about the importance of their kids, cars, and homes, but if a bank employee makes a mistake and suddenly your financial information is stolen or made public, you've got one hell of a lawsuit, and one severely ill person on your hands.
While the technology does seem a bit silly in its inception, and beating this security measure is a moderately difficult at best, what security guard or bank personnel is not going to notice the strange looking individual with 3-D glasses on and a terrible case of tilting-head looking over the shoulder of a CSR or teller.
Of course it's beatable, and of course it's not going to make sense in your average office environment. But I'll tell you right now that there is nothing better than this, that I can think of, that has come along in terms of blocking people from looking over the shoulder of bank employees. Sure there are vertical-blind-like shadded screens, where the information is only viewable when looking directly at the monitor (and we employ those as well), but this again is foilable by a person's mere position. If the employee gets up for coffee, a smoke, whatever, the information the screen is still viewable by anyone with a direct line of sight.
This technology can prevent the average person from seeing what's on an employee's screen. The "average person" is about 95% of all bank customers. The "average person" won't really care how it works, won't want to know why it works, but I'll tell ya, the "average person" will feel a 100 times more confident in his/her financial institutions commitment to security and privacy when using this technology, even if it can be foiled by 3D-glasses or expensive shades.
When you combine this technology with the common sense of "closing all applications when leaving your desk," a financial instutition's employee's desk becomes 10 times safer than it was originally, and that's a big step. I'm certain that the larger financial institutions out there (Citibank, et al) would be glad to show off the new technology and tout about its security, even if it can be foiled by the strange looking man wearing $3 3D glasses.
Would I still be able to seem my screen with my peril sensitive sunglasses on?
Without screen shots, critical commentary, or a real review it's hard to tell just how effective this really is. SLIGHTLY polarized light is very common in the everyday environment. For example, light from most parts of the sky is partially polarized. Many of us have probably noticed pale rainbow- or oil-film-like colorations in car windows as a result of the interactions between birefringence in the prestressed safety glass and natural polarized light from the sky. This is even more noticable on airline flights with airliner windows.
I think it is VERY unlikely that the screen looks PERFECTLY blank all the time. I'll bet that, for example, in a laptop on an airplane, it would be easy to see that there was SOMETHING on the screen, and even to read it without glasses by close inspection.
So, I'm not completely sure I understand the practical point of this invention. It isn't going to make spies think that the screen is truly blank or truly turned off--if, indeed, the fact that someone is looking at the screen with special glasses was not a giveaway in itself. As a casual "privacy" device it probably works--a spy probably couldn't read it from three feet away, and staring at it from six inches away while rotating it to get the greatest amount of naturally polarized light would make the spy conspicuous. But various existing privacy devices that limit the usable angle of view would probably be just as effective.
On the other hand, if someone can develop a version of this that simulataneously display TWO DIFFERENT images with 90-degree-opposite polarization--the computer-display equivalent of a Polaroid "Vectograph"--it might be a useful form of 3D-with-glasses display.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Hmmm... it seems that the MPAA has closed half of the analog hole. Now they can do video-on-demand and charge for each connected headset!
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
If they have and X-Ray version of the glasses i'm up for a pair.
You have to get contact lenses so you can wear our polarized sunglasses to see your monitor. Glasses of your own just wont due. And no you can't have polarized glasses of you own, then we couldn't restrict you from seeing screens by taking your glasses away.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I'd better get rid of my polarized sunglasses before they come after me for DMCA violations...
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
If they don't want people having a peek at their monitor, rather than building some complex/ineffective system using light polarization, why not simply drop monitors alltogether and use some sort of eye-mounted display like iGlasses ?
Of course, all the glasses will have to be the biggest, ugliest, most obvious looking things on the planet so no one will no to take them.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Theys should make them of the style worn by Agent Smith of the Matrix. I'd love working with a company with everyone wearing those!
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Actually, on the TV production of HHGTTG, this was how the peril sensitive glasses worked.
The glasses were polarised, clear normally, and when they were required to go black the polarising sheet on the camera was rotated, making them appear black.
Yes, I have the DVD with the production notes. Yes, i read them all. Yes, I should be able to find a better use of my time, but I cant.
If they prevent anyone who doesn't actively try to see the information, they stop 98% of possible intrusions.
I'd love to see the evidence that proves that 98% of all intrusions are accidental.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
You heve to use two of these glasses, in a right angle ot eachother. That way, really nobody can see what you are looking at...
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Take an LCD screen, remove the front-polarizer and there you go. Simple.
-- Roger.
I've been meaning to get this on Slashdot for some time now, but I worked on a much more powerful version of such glasses over a year ago at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, MA, with Researcher William Y. Yerazunis. Here's the technical report if you'd like to see it. We also filed a few patents way back then as well, so I wonder if this work infringes on our own.
We can actually hide secret images within any image or animation you'd like, not just an obvious blank screen. We also designed a cryptographically secure version which isn't cracked by simply having another pair of special glasses (you also need the private key). Check out the paper, it has some image examples (there might be a few technical errors in it that we later fixed but wasn't updated in the paper. I'm not at MERL anymore, so I haven't bothered checking really).
Also, we made a video demo for the conference which our technical report was accepted in paper form (at OzCHI2001). I have that video, and can digitize it if there's enough demand. By the way, while I was testing the glasses, I actually used They Live screenshots so that one could simulate Rowdy Roddy Piper's shock upon seeing the billboards and aliens. Also, we referenced John Carpenter in our paper.
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
Second, how many different polarizations are there?
There are more kinds, circular for example. It means the electric field is rotating, either clockwise or counterclockwise.
But that won't work for screens. The liquid crystal will ROTATE a LINEAR polarization but won't reverse a circular polarization. The screen starts with a light source, linear-polarizes it, selectively rotates the polarization, then linear-polarizes again. Depending on the amount of rotation you get more or less light.
This ancient hack consists of taking the final linear polarizer off the front of the screen and wearing it as a pair of glasses. The screen now emits a constant-brightness, varying-LINEAR-polarization light, which isn't translated into variable intensity until it hits the polarized glasses.
But that means that if you get the polarization right you get the image, if you're off by 90 degrees you get a negative image, and at other angles you get an image that has an intended-versus-perceived intensity graph something like a check-mark. Unless you happen to be at the angle where the letters and the background match exactly it's still readable, and if you're at exactly that wrong angle just tilt your head a LITTLE bit and they reappear.
So stock polarizing sunglasses read all these screens, no problem.
If you could come up with a final filter for the screen that converted, say, the vertical component of linearly-polarized light into right-circular and the horizontal into left-circular, you could then use circularly polarized glasses and defeat linearly-polarized. But I don't know of any physical mechanism (let alone one that could be turned into a cheap thin film) that would do this, even for monochrome, let alone the near-octave of light used by color displays or the full-octave for black-and-white.
Even if you DID come up with a circularly-polarized hack you'd only have TWO possibilities for the glasses - and viewing the display with the wrong one would just give you a negative, but readable, image.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Gee, this would be just the thing for Digital Rights Management. Imagine, if your CPRM or Palladium personal ID were coded into the glasses! You would only see things they wanted you to see, and only things you've paid for, of course.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Quick, someone report these folks to the feds. They are in violation of the DMCA for distributing eye-wear -- or would that be eye-ware :^) -- that will decrypt my polarized monitor.
Companies would never go for this. They would be exposing themselves to massive costs to provide people who wear prescription glasses with polarized glasses in their prescription. They will also be risking lawsuits from people who find that the weight of glasses causes sinus problems.
If I was on a plane and the guy next to me whipped out his glasses and 'secure' laptop I'd maybe be a little alarmed. OTOH, if I walk to the loo and see that another person is doing the same thing, I'd probably point it out. Could they be looking at layouts of the plane and coordinating plans secretly? I'm fairly technical, but just imagine the 60 year old grandmother who has never flown before and is scared to death already.
In the office, you can reposition your screen. Generally if you have information so sensitive that you'd need one of these you work in a little office with a locking door. Why does everybody, including the intern, up in HR have their own closing office, while IT has 'the bullpen'? Hmm..
1) obtain, and take apart a $5 calculator.
2) look at the LCD - there's a little piece of polarizing plastic in front of it - hey!
3) when i take this out, i can't see the screen.
4) stick the little piece of polarizing plastic that was taped in front of the LCD, and tape it to my glasses instead.
5) apply for New Scientist Story, and claim we invented something unique, and get slashdotted.
duh!
j
You can get privacy filters for any monitor. 3M makes one which is available from any office supply store, like Staples.
This "invention" is silly. I can pick up a pair of polarized sunglasses for $8 at the local drug store.
Is it near Kioto? North of Iokohama maybe? Ies, I think that must be it.
With this technology and a decent pair of headphones, your boss doesn't know you're playing Quake at the office again...
-JDF
I gave up caring. I now watch dvd length pornos fullscreen on a laptop on a plane with small children sitting next to me. They don't mind so much as the stewardesses. They won't say anything to you but you get some strange looks and probably some spit in your food. Good thing the food is already inedible.
You don't need 3-d glasses or polarised glasses!
:-)
A simlpe mirror (like the ones girls have in their hand-bags) is enough to filter out polarised light. Simply hold the mirror against the screen at an angle of about 45 degrees and view the screen through the mirror (use two mirrors, if you're unable to read backwards!): only light polarised vertically to the mirror will be reflcted and thus visible...
Simple optics one-o-one.
ms
...he warns that this security measure could be defeated by anyone who can get hold of a pair of correctly configured, light polarising glasses.
The other option is to scramble a monochrome screen with a red or green or blue filter.
If the filter is red then all red, white, yellow, tan, etc... pixels will be white and all other shades will be pushed to black. The classic trick is to scramble the colorspace of the pixels randomly so other viewers see multicolored static unless they have one of the color filters.
Now another option is to sync the static with special glasses, but if you have that then why muck with the monitor signal? Now one other option is to create a multi-polarized (simplest tech is to take two polarized sheets, go scissor-happy and glue to a clear plastic sheet in the many random orientations that would occur) pair of glasses. Then sync the polarization to the unique glasses, but the viewer has to maintain an exact close distance & have very little head movement.
Another variation of the concept is to do the same thing with the pure color filters and cut & glue the pieces into a stained-glass unique viewer which matches the color-space scrambling of the monitor. Again the same limitations of viewing distance & head motion come into play. However, the glasses will look a damn spot more stylish.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
Exactly. I thought up this brilliant idea about 20 years ago, when I was about 10 and into electronics.
Get any LCD screen, remove the polarizing film and use some "special" glasses.
I have a nice pair of "special" glasses, they're called Bolle.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
That's easy do to. It's commonly known as quarter wave plate. Put it in front of your h and v polarized screen and rotate it to 45 degrees from h/v. It will turn h polarized in to right (or left) and v polarized into left (or right, depending on the rotation of the qw plate). See here [gsu.edu] how it works.
Nope - because you only get right-circular and left-circular when the polarization is 45-degrees to the quarter-wave plate's axis. Other angles produce eliptical polarization. So variable intensity (other than on vs. off) is out if you want security against cheap polaroid sunglasses (or viewing the screen in a glare surface).
Also you'll be stuck with a monochrome screen unless you can come up with three narrow-band incoherent colors and a plate that's a quarter-wave for all three.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Employees who are unworthy of their posts will be unable to see what is on the screen, even with the glasses.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.