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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."
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)
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.
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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.)
> 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?
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.
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