Slashdot Mirror
'Uncrackable' Document and Product Security?
Curunculus writes "The Engineer reports that a unique 'fingerprint' formed by microscopic surface imperfections on almost all paper documents, plastic cards and product packaging could be used as a cheaper method to combat fraud.
One of the developers, Professor Cowburn commented: "The beauty of this system is that there is no need to modify the item being protected in any way with tags, chips or inks; it's as if documents and packaging have their own unique DNA. This makes protection covert, low-cost, simple to integrate into the manufacturing process and immune to attacks against the security feature itself."
This system is now being commercialised via Ingenia Technology, a spin off company."
From what I understand, the imperfections are _everywhere_ over the document. I guess they'd do their little speckle-counting thing over six or ten different square inches (or centimeters, or whatever) of the document, and then folding doesn't matter. Besides, if the surface profile can survive scorching and abrasion, I think folding might not be a huge deal, and pressing certainly not.
I've worked with speckle-based systems, and I'm skeptical about this, since there's a _lot_ of variance when you're dealing with laser speckle. I don't really know how their imaging system could quickly and efficiently discriminate between hundreds of little dots, average their sizes, statistics, etc.
Any OE-s around that specialize in speckle to clear this up?
Well, actually I didn't read the linked FA yet, but I read about this same thing elsewhere a few days ago. They said the chances of two peices of the same kind of paper have the same signature were 1:1000. Two reams of paper and you're in (or 1,000 peices of passport plastic, or whatever). Hardly an effort considering the documents they're considering using it on. Unless they can bump that number into the billions or more, it's pointless because it's too easy to manufacture a duplicate of any given document that has an identical fingerprint just by brute force.
11*43+456^2
Um, no. Different kind of scanner... The type of scanner they are talking about in the article looks for characteristics of the paper / media itself and not what is printed on it. The key phrase in the article is "Using the optical phenomenon of 'laser speckle'"... This implies that they shine a laser on the document. Don't think your standard flat bed scanner is going to be doing that anytime soon...