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New Technique Could Trace Documents By Printer
An anonymous reader submits "From this article at Purdue News, 'Researchers at Purdue University have developed a method that will enable authorities to trace documents to specific printers, a technique law-enforcement agencies could use to investigate counterfeiting, forgeries and homeland security matters.' The neat thing is that they are exploiting the characteristics of the print process itself to identify the printer." <update> One of the folks e-mailed me to say that the HP LaserJet 9000dn was one of the big ones tested with.
Sure, it sounds nice for the gov't to track down bad guys, but what if the technology to do this becomes public? Most of the /. population won't be able to pass notes to girls without them finding out who its from!!!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
They got the memo about cover letters on their TPS Reports.
Michalangelo Progr
The technique uses two methods to trace a document: first, by analyzing a document to identify characteristics that are unique for each printer, and second by designing printers to purposely embed individualized characteristics in documents.
Sorry to rain on your parade, Homeland Security, but if counterfeiters can counterfeit hard currency worth a damn, they can certainly hack a printer to make it quickly change configurations at the drop of a hat. Get your marker and bic pens ready, all ye counterfeiters!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The neat thing is that they are exploiting the characteristics of the print process itself to identify the printer.
From the article:
The technique uses two methods to trace a document: first, by analyzing a document to identify characteristics that are unique for each printer, and second by designing printers to purposely embed individualized characteristics in documents.
So there are actually two ways and the second requires redesigning printers. I wonder if the government will push printer makers in to changing their printer in the "interest of national security."
The problem here is many of the peices they would use to track the printers are integral parts of the replacable toner cartridges and printer ink kits. Only printers that have perm drums and heads will be easily traceable.
....I use to use one of those automatic birds that would carve the letters into the stone tablets, but the cost of replacement beaks was very high (and BTW, only use OEM beaks, 3rd party beaks void your bird warranty)
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Then maybe they can finally track those unverifiable CBS documents back to Karl Rove.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"DOCUMENTS PRODUCED BY BUSINESS MACHINES
It goes without saying that the proliferating market of modern business technology
such as copiers, fax machines and printers reduces a systematic forensic approach.
However, a number of projects report progress in the following:
Classification of full colour copiers
Doherty (31) gives an overview on state-of-the-art classification of ink-jet printers
and inks. Interestingly, the findings indicate that the results of TLC analysis
"before" and "after" show significant differences because the ink-components are
modified by heat during the print process. For specialists in traditional typewriting
examination, the overview of Frensel (41) on typewriters produced in the former
East Germany is of interest when identifying products manufactured before and
after World War II. Gervais & Lindblom (43) present a case illustrating detection of
digital manipulation on a facsimile printout. Hammond (47) compares the collected
technical data of facsimile machines. The demonstration of secondary typewriting
and alterations by the use of grids is today easily carried out by using the
appropriate computer software, as shown by Hicks (55). If there are actually
different computer assisted typewriting data collections, the system DRUIDE,
developed by Holzapfel & Marx (58) is comprehensive and designed for routine
casework. The traditional typewriter - disappearing on the market - still has its
forensic impact. Few references go back to the roots of typewriting examination and
commercial production, e.g., in the former Eastern Block. Horton (60) compares the
identifiability of the flatbed scanner and its products by comparing the marks on
scanned images. Lauterbach (68) describes 30 fax machines and their characteristic
printouts for identification purposes. A survey by Tweedy (129) on state-of-the-art
colour Laser copier identification by bitmap coding includes an overview of
counterfeit protection by the characteristics and class of the major copying
machines on the market. Wagner (134) presents the "Australian Toner Library" and
the discriminating power of FTIR as compared to ATR. In a similar direction, but
looking more specifically at the dating and sourcing of the Transmitting Terminal
Identifier on a fax document, is a study by Westwood & Novotny (138). White et al
(139) show the benefits of Surface Enhanced Resonance RAMAN Scattering
Spectroscopy (SERRS) for an almost non-destructive spectroscopic examination of
inks. Winter (141) studied the evidential value of the dot pattern of colour ink-jet
and bubble-jet printers for individual identification."
http://www.interpol.int/Public/Forensic/IFSS/meet
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
I recall a Brady Bunch episode where Alice was typing letters and sending them to Jan to make her feel special. She was feeling overlooked, being the middle daughter and all. Well the Bradys traced the letters back to Alice's typewriter because it dropped its Y's. Not sure what all of this means, but it seems ontopic.
I work for a large copier/network printer company (Not Brand X), and our machines have been able to do this for a very long time. A VERY tiny bar-code style serial number is placed everywhere in any printed and copied document (you need a microscope to see it).
This might be news because small desktop printers have never had small enough 'pixels' to keep it smaller then your eye can see.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
What about HP inkjet printers with the way they print from the cart? Toss it and do you have a "new" printer according to this kind of tracking?
As far as those who are concerned about the government secretly tracking them down by the printer signatures in their anonymous manifestoes I think there are other things to worry about from the government.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I can see an emerging market in "stealth printers"(tm) if that happens. This is likely to go the way of the P4 serial number. -- nothing interesting here
About 15 years ago, I had an attorney do some work for me and he boasted about a software package he used that made small custom mutations to the font each document was printed in, such that once such a document was printed, it was very difficult for anyone to add or replace pages without being detectable as a later change to the original document.
When I'd batch up my print jobs for 6 months, print them all out the immediately, destroy my printer and get a new one. :)
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
Xerox (and others, I'm sure) have done this for quite some time.
About 5 or 6 years ago a friend that owned a print shop and used a Xerox color laser printer told me about Xerox imprinting every print with a watermark that could be decoded to obtain the serial number of the actual machine used in the printing.
The watermark was undetectable to the human eye and didn't alter the presentation of the image.
They did this at the behest of the government because it's so easy to print money on these things. This way they can track the money back to the machine via the serial number.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
Oh come on. They could do this on CSI a couple of years ago. What's taken 'real' law enforcement so long????
So basically, they are saying if they had the original printer, and the document they could put the two together.
In order for this to provide the means to track a forged document to it's source will require printers to be "tested" when sold so their "printing fingerprint" can be recorded.
Otherwise, at best if can serve as a confirmation, not a tracing method. This is how ballistic characteristics test are used. They are used to confirm that a gun fired a bullet, not to trace the bullet to the gun.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
It's forensics. You can trace bullet to a specific gun using forensics. You can trace a typewritten page to a specific typewriter using forensics. This is just a way to do the same thing with printers.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Wow! A plan to have traceable embedded signatures in all printers and resulting documents. Finally, a proposal for a government mandated way to trace all documents back to their creator. Remember it is for homeland security, so don't dare oppose this on the idea that it would chill free speech and decent. Besides, think of the children....Boy I feel safer already.
Really, I have to say this is a bad idea. The article goes beyond a forensic technique of trying to match documents to the printer that made it. They conclude that that is not possible in cases like ink jet printers with print heads on the replaceable ink cartridge so they propose embedding an "extrinsic signature" in all printers and printed documents. This would mean that every document printed would have a traceable signature; the protest letter you sent to congress, the art project you made with your kids, the protest flyer you posted on campus--everything.
The excuse for this new proposal is that it is for homeland security and preventing counterfeiting. But the broader truth of the matter is that this would be another nail in the coffin for free speech. Already, new police powers through the Patriot Act help make every posting on the Internet traceable. With the internet you have to connect from somewhere and almost all of the connections are logged.* Printed material was a way around this. Nobody could look at the paper and trace it back to you without some luck. You could write letters, post flyers and what not, and say what you liked. This proposed system would alter that landscape significantly.
Considering that there has not yet been a single conviction from the thousands of post 9/11 secret roundups, I'm reluctant to give our new found police state the benefit of the doubt.
*Yes, I know this is an over simplification.
This reminds me of older detective novels, where letters typed on typewriters are often important clues. The forensics lab looks at the blackmail note, and knows the exact brand and type of the typewriter it was written on - after which the killer, being the only one in a hundred miles with that specific typewriter, is easily found :)
Jan
A lot of what makes the difference in each printer such that they can tell the printer that was used will be based on mechanical variances between printers. And I would have to guess that if I drop my printer from a height of about 6 ft, there will be enough mechanical difference in the way it printed before I dropped it that their test (at least the mechanical part) will be unable to detect that it was my printer.
For that matter, I would have to think that switching ink cartridges (or drums), switching gears between printers, switching paper trays, possibly even print drivers will have a large enough effect that this method will not be able to correctly identify nearly as many printers correctly as they claim given the fact that conterfeiters will be trying to beat them at their own game.
Just my thoughts...
There's another *New* technique that Law Enforcement will be using, it allows them to view data on your hard drive that has been erased!!!!
I boycott signatures
Things like this are troublesome, though:
One document obtained by the AP, a 1998 U.S. government business solicitation, mandated that "any color printer must include a tracing system that encodes system identification in any output. This will tie the output to the originating equipment so that forensic identification of the equipment is possible in the event of illegal printing of currency images due to failure or circumvention of the recognition system(s)...."
In a number of contracts where the US government has bought printers, they've required tracing features to be present-- effectively forcing them to be in printers sold to the general public as well. So effectively, many color printers are embedding their serial number in output documents. (And this is a lot more damaging-- saying this particular printer made a particular document, rather than a Epson Stylus 700).
Crap, yet another DRM-less/security-less gizmo I gotta hoard for when they're all wired into Ashcroft's penal colony.
You think your inkjet will last six months?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Does anyone beleive that if these devices make it to market, the "evil doers" are going to rush right out to the store and buy a printer with a "Homeland Security Inside" sticker on it? And then properly register it? Anyone with serious criminal intent is either going to use a non-equiped printer, or a printer which is stolen or misleadingly registered.
Don't get me wrong, this is kinda cool, and I'm sure it will help for things like kidnappings, but "Homeland Security"? Give me a break.
"We will actually modify the way the printer puts marks on the paper," Chiu said. "This method is very difficult to get around because information about the internal workings of specific printers is not commonly available, even on the Internet." How long before this changes and people start soldering modchips into their printer circuitboards?
The excuse for this new proposal is that it is for homeland security and preventing counterfeiting. But the broader truth of the matter is that this would be another nail in the coffin for free speech.
*Puzzled look* Huh? When did they confiscate all the pens and pencils?
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
And if you prefer to read that information in hard copy, you can alw . . . oh, fuck it.
The arsenal is big enough. It's time for them to actually do their jobs and stop whining about needing more tools. How about if everyone had to register with the police staion nearest their place of employment? Is that just another tool in the fight against child abuse? How about we tattoo everyone on the forehead with a bar code so the pulic-place cameras can track everyone? Would that be just another tool for Homeland Security too?
The Constitution guarantees my right to be secure in my effects and papers and as far as I'm concerned that means I have a right to dispose of my papers in any way I see fit. That includes anonymously if I so choose. Giving anybody, especially the government, the ability to track those papers back to me is just not right. Are we having fun yet watching the Constitution get raped repeatedly these last few years? Once they're done with it you-know-who will be asked to bend over next.
I worked at Kinko's for years. At least their color photocopiers had traceable features for as long as I worked there. Of course we all know if you try to copy cash on a color copier, it'll spit out entire sheets of green that cannot be turned off by the user. A tech has to come reset it and by policy, law enforcement is notified. But if you look super super closely, there is a pattern (not random, but specific to a particular copier) of yellow that can be used to track a copy back to a machine (and in the case of Kinko's, a closed-circuit camera of the person running the copies.) All the Kinko's I worked at/visited had cameras pointed at the color copiers.
;)
Of course Beavis and Butthead have shown us that for $1/copy you can make a decent copy of coins...
Boy are you out of date. SMS, the only way to message in class.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Low end laser and ink printers are so cheap currenrly - you can pay for two new ones with the first sheet of paper you fill with forged $ bills.
Smash the el-cheapo printer, dump the parts, get a new one, start over. Probably not very effective to stop counterfeiting currency.
Print it, fax it, copy it and then let them try to find the orginal printer.
If I'm really THAT into keeping my identity secret, I'll just print it out at some kiosk in a mall.
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Key words there: as long as.
Example: The DMCA and PATRIOT act authorized the use of some pretty brutal tactics, technologies for which were also developed without foresight of this possibility.
How do we know there won't be a PATRIOT 2 act, just as gullibly let through the Legislative branch of our government that will authorize, say, tracking down all 'suspicious with reasonable doubt' messages using this. Your private e-mail, or anything you may have printed, including private information, could be traced to you on basis of "It smelled bad" a la' current Stop-And-Frisk laws of the NYPD.
In case you are about to call me paranoid, the people that thought the PATRIOT would pass through congress were considered the same.
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
so, now I expect that Lexmark will claim that third-party toner cartridges could get me in trouble with the law if they had been previously used for some nefarious purpose.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Jefferson is rolling over in his grave.
The 9000 is the largest printer HP makes. It is very, very fast. Probably not as fast as some of the Xerox docucenters and such, but fast.
The problem is that people are stupid and don't actually examine cash they take. It used to be that cashiers could tell instantly if you handed them a fake bill, on feel alone. it's not like the US Mint and Secret Service haven't make efforts to tell people how to ID real currency...
Please help metamoderate.
He told us this story (BTW, I have no idea if it is true.) about how all photocopiers in the USSR had a serial number etched on the glass so the copies it made could be traced. Much easier to track down papers proclaiming the joys of Liberty I guess.
Well, that teacher has past on but I really wonder what he'd think of all this? All kidding aside is the US starting to look a little like the old USSR?
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Related to parent post because of the source: The Bush "Guard memos" are forgeries! The Hailey Connection
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
You know the government can compare fingerprints. The government can compare DNA. The government can match paper fiber samples and patterns. Compared to all the government can do right now, I'd say this ability is rather innocuous. First of all they have to find the original printer for one thing.
The Cheese Stands Alone.
The serial number can be encoded using steganographic techniques you will never 'see' the encoded string unless you have the magic Homeland Security decoder ring.
On a more prosaic level DIGIMARC allows photoshop users to embed a unique ID number within your image and if someone opens up your image with a DIGIMARC enabled tool alarm bells go off.
Anyone know where we can get some Diablo 630's or Okidata Microline 83/93's (printers too stupid to encode images)