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Xerox Exploits Printer Flaws To Make Pseudo-Holograms
Red Wolf writes "A chance discovery by Xerox lets printers superimpose glossy images on regular printouts, creating the possibility for document authentication along the lines of holograms on credit cards. The new technology, called Glossmark, can use ordinary office printers to superimpose a glossy image on an ordinary printed document in a way that can't be photocopied or otherwise easily reproduced."
From reading the article (yes I read actually read it), it would seem that only the "wax" type color laserjet printers have this ability. There was a Slashdot article a while back that dealt with color laser printers and alternatives to inkjets. The news.com.com article does specify the models or type of printers where this was discovered. Any other info on this?
I'm sure some hackers will try to do some mods on their printers to control this as well. {cough}fake holograms{/cough}
On another note, how cool a job do these "Xerox Scientists" have? I need to get a job where I can hardware hack like these guys.
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
t's a little much to expect a hologram to come out of your office printer, but scientists at Xerox think they have the next best thing.
On Thursday, the company is unveiling a new technology it calls "Glossmark," which can use ordinary office printers to superimpose a glossy image on an ordinary printed document in a way that can't be photocopied or otherwise easily reproduced.
Taking advantage of eccentricities in laser printing processes, once viewed as flaws, the Xerox scientists think they've found a way to authenticate hard copies of printed documents in much the same way that holographic stickers prove the validity of credit cards and drivers licenses.
"This does speak to something that is going to need to be addressed to ensure hard-copy security," said Dan Corsetti, an industry analyst with research firm IDC, who saw a demonstration several months ago. "There really is no reliable or affordable way of securing the content on hard-content documents, apart from putting it in a vault and locking it up."
The new Xerox process, while still a long way from market, points up a persistent demon that has dogged the technology industry's longstanding efforts to secure digital content, whether it be corporate documents or copyrighted movies and music.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on efforts to encrypt or otherwise protect content against people who might make perfect digital copies with a computer or other device. But little of this technology has been able to do anything about decidedly easy methods of reproduction such as photocopying a hard copy of a document, or taping a song as it comes out of a stereo's speakers.
In Xerox's case, the Glossmark procedure came about almost wholly as an accident.
Lab researchers had long been aware of an issue with some printers producing glossy areas in a printout, which would reflect light a little more strongly than the surrounding area. The phenomenon was an artifact of the printing process, in which plastic-like toner was melted onto the paper.
Studying a way to reduce the so-called differential gloss, researchers discovered that they could actually manipulate it, controlling where the glossy areas appeared in a printed document.
"They came back and said, 'We don't know if we can reduce it, but we sure can enhance it,'" said Rob Rolleston, the laboratory manager overseeing the Xerox husband-and-wife team that worked on the process. "They said, 'Wow, we really can control this much more than we thought we could.'"
The team worked with ways to send glossy images to ordinary color office printers and before long had figured out a way to create a consistent pattern with the glossy areas. The embedded glossy goatse image was invisible when the document was examined straight on, but would appear, hologram-like, when held at the right angle to the light, they found. However, after seeing a three dimensional rendering of the goatse man; many of the test viewers are now blind and seeking psychiatric help. "This technology certainly is not without it's potential health risks" Rob was heard to understate.
The technology isn't poised to find its way immediately into products for Xerox, which is struggling to fend off increasing competition from rivals such as Ikon and Canon in its core markets. Nor is the company wholly convinced that the discovery will add up to a new security technology.
The ability to make shiny images appear inside of printed documents could also be used in greeting cards or for artistic purposes, Rolleston said. The company ultimately will have to decide--if it is intended to be a security-enhancing process aimed at authenticating documents, having the technology widely available to would-be document forgers would be a problem, Rolleston said.
Analysts are pleased that the company is thinking about the issue--even if only by accident.
"Document security is a leading concern among IT users," IDC's Corsetti said. "The hard copy has always been the weak link in the security chain."
Its just multilayer printing, its has NOTHING to do with a hologram.
Its interesting, though pretty much common sense, if you have run a sheet thru a printer 15 times.. ( and pray it doesn't jam.. the structure of paper is changed when it passes thru a fuser.. every time after that you risk paper jams. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Which is exactly why both the company that produces the paper and the company that produces the printing press are under contractual obligation not to sell either to anyone but the US government.
"Contractual obligation," you say? I pity the poor fool who tries to go behind the federal government's back when it comes to the money it prints. And you thought IRS audits were bad...
Jeremy
Looking for a Python IRC bot?
They apparently are considering using the exploit decoratively instead of for security, since it is always possible to forge something made by "common office printers."
I could make a damn good couterfeit $20 bill if I only had the paper and the press that makes them.
And your aunt could be your uncle, if she only had balls and a dick.
You might get the paper by bleaching one-dollar bills, but you damn sure ain't getting the press. The Intaglio process used on U.S. currency applies the ink to the paper at great pressure, and in sufficient quantity to achieve an embossed effect. U.S. currency has a distinctive feel because of this, and were you to slip an inkjet or color laser-printed bleached-single $20 bill into a stack of $20s you used to pay for something, the cashier would notice it didn't feel right before he/she noticed it didn't look right.
Intaglio presses are huge, somewhat rare, and cost in the millions of dollars, so you ain't gonna but putting one in your basement anytime soon. If you had the financial capability to do so, you wouldn't need to counterfeit money.
Having said that, the Secret Service does have counterfeit bills produced by Intaglio presses, and believe that they are being produced by the government of some country hostile to the U.S.-- because that's the kind of moxie it takes to get your hands on an Intaglio press.
From what I gathered reading the article... this *technology* is about controlling the glossyness of certain areas on a printed page. I don't think it involves running printed pages back through the printer... instead words/images would be differentiated by their gloss relative to the flat ink surrounding them. Looking straight at a matt photograph one would see nothing unusuall but looking at an angle one could make out shiny text, the degree of gloss is controlled, hence the "invisible to the eye" option.
just my 2c,
-ry
It's already so easy to counterfit U.S. money, using Xerox printers.
Ahem, where exactly are you going to get the paper to print it on? US currency paper has a special cotton content that you can't get in the states, even by special order. And what about the "security stripe"? Nope, sorry.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
I hope this gets used on US currency. Holograms haven't been used yet because they haven't survived the torture tests. Maybe this will fare better.
This tech takes advantage of the way laser printers melt toner to produce an image on paper. It would only work if currency was laser imaged. That won't happen b/c the process is too slow and it certainly wouldn't survive a torture test.
The drawback that I see is that it only works on images--plain text wouldn't have enough toner laid down to produce a noticeable image.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
You can use the paper and the strip from smaller denominations ($5 $10) to make bigger ones ($20 $100) that look real.
First, this is nothing like a hologram. (Reporter: This is shiny, holograms are shiny, this must be a hologram.)
When you print continuous tone images with specific ink colors, you have to lay down tiny dots that cover, e.g. 30% of the paper with cyan, 20% magenta, 10% yellow, 15% black. The inks are then fixed in some way: heating, rolling, burnishing or whatever--details vary based on printing technology.
If you put down the ink so that the cyan and yellow dots are: separated by a small gap; or touching each other; or piled up on top of each other; you will get different print characteristics.
It may be e.g., that when wax-based ink drops are piled on top of each other, the burnishing gives it a glossy texture, while the same amounts of inks distributed in separate dots gives a matte finish. (This is just an example based on absolutly no specific knowledge.)
Postscript and other printer control languages are sufficiently expressive that the software can control where the ink dots go. This lets the glossiness be controlled.
This posting is probably a DMCA violation.
I don't live in america but if I remember correctly all your notes are the same size, wash a 1 dollar bill and print 100 on it... We can't do that in the UK cos 1,5 10, 20, 50... are all bigger than the lesser valued note. Umm... Not thatI'm condoning counterfeiting or was considering it ~*shifty eyes*~
?
The document can still be reproduced, the point is -- the pseudo-hologram can not. If the document is missing the pseudo-hologram, you know that it has been duplicated.
The security would lie in the fact that it looks different from different angles. So if you scan it/photocopy it/whatever, you only get *one* angle on it, and thus there is no easy way to get a digitized version of the watermark to feed to that other Xerox printer.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
The US has never repudiated its currency, and is unlikely to do so, so a $20 printed before the addition of the polymer security stripe is still legal tender, if somewhat rare. If you were trying to reproduce high quality paper for counterfeit currency, you'd best aim for pre-polymer-strip bills. That will also save you from having to deal with some of the the other publically acknowledged anticounterfeiting measures (like microprinting, variable optical printing, etc).
Paper currency in the US is printed on paper that is 25% linen, 75% cotton fiber in content, with small amounts of blue and red silk fibers added into the pulp. There is no wood pulp.
Processing leaves the paper a uniform shade of beige or off-white, easily distinguished from most bleached paper. This color is also an anticounterfeiting measure, by the way, since its easily distinguished from white, and bleaching away the ink from an existing bill will likely change that color.
And just out of curiousity, who exactly popped up and decided that a kilobyte was no longer 1024 bytes? I never heard of this.
The IEC. It isn't exactly a redefinition, since AFAIK kilobyte wasn't officially defined as a unit by many standards organizations. Kibi- and friends were coined because standards bodies are by their nature incredibly pedantic, so overloading the SI prefixes was out of the question.
There was an alternative proposal to prefix binary units with 'di-', so 1024 bytes would be a dikilobyte. In writing a subscript '2' would be inserted after the prefix, giving you something like K2b. You were explicitly allowed to keep saying 'kilobyte' in conversation. This system is vastly superior for any number reasons, which is why it wasn't adopted.
As far as I know 'byte' is still undefined, so while a one KiB is definitely 1024 bytes, no one can say how many bits it is.