'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."

Comments

Fraud prevention?

[Joe Random]

From the article:

Using the optical phenomenon of 'laser speckle', researchers examined the fine structure of different surfaces using a focused laser, and recorded the intensity of the reflection. The technique was tried on a variety of materials including matt-finish plastic cards, identity cards and coated paperboard packaging and resulted in clear recognition between the samples. This continued even after they were subjected to rough handling including submersion in water, scorching, scrubbing with an abrasive cleaning pad and being scribbled on with thick black marker.

So let me get this straight; I can scrub on one of these "fingerprinted" document until the letters wear off, write whetever I want on it with a black marker, and it will pass the verification check? Doesn't that kind of prevent the entire purpose of fingerprinting documents in the first place?

"Well Mr. Random, while it is quite unusual to see a tax rebate check of *ahem* eleventy-billion dollars, the article passed all verification checks. We've deposited the amount into your account. Have a nice day."

Re:Surface imperfections?

[Wilson_6500]

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?

Shhhhhh...

[GuitarNeophyte]

You're not supposed to point out the elephants in the middle of the room. Just play along and be nice. And remember to bring plenty of peanuts.

TFA indicates it is flawed

[photon317]

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.