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Xerox Develops New Way to Print Invisible Ink
scott3778 writes "Xerox said on Wednesday that its scientists have perfected a new method for printing hidden fluorescent wording using standard digital printing equipment.
According to the company, the discovery paves the way for customers and businesses alike to add an additional layer of security to commonly printed materials such as checks, tickets, coupons, and other high-value documents.
The hidden fluorescent words and letters show up only under ultraviolet light, said Reiner Eschbach, a research fellow in the Xerox Innovation Group, and the co-inventor of the patented process. What's more, the method for printing them doesn't require the use of special fluorescent inks."
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_10.php#00406 3
Xerox (and the rest) have been hiding identifying marks in *our* printouts for ages now. It's a good job there's nothing to fear from our democratically elected governments who fight evil and oppression around the world.
Step 1. Develop a simple document security measure that can be detected using UV light.
Step 2. Invent a way so that anybody can reproduce the same security measure using readily-available equipment, without special inks.
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit!
Oh wait. I guess step 3 would be "start counterfeiting things."
Breakfast served all day!
begin message
end message
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
XXX#######
Counterfeiting Canadian money just got a whole lot easier.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If it's invisible, how do you really know its been printed?
How long until this is used instead of yellow ink to track printouts back to the printer they came from?
FTA:
Xerox expects that over time, the technology will be used in personalized checks that will have the account holder's signature printed in a fluorescent stripe.
"A merchant could easily compare the fluorescent signature with the actual one to validate the check," said Eschbach.
Yeah, so someone gets one of these, what then?
That's even worse, cause normally someone doesn't have the signature of the account holder if they were to steal/find a check. This will actually give them that, and make the check appear that much more authentic when used ("What do you mean, check fraud? That's your signature, isn't it?").
You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people. - notnAP, #26891325
Ok, if they are really printing UV with a standard CMYK color laser printer then they deserve a patent. That's real innovation at work and not some lame ass '...on the Internet' patent.
Democrat delenda est
Of course, a thief with a flourescent lamp could easily determine what your signature should look like, and so how does that provide any kind of security? I suppose it provides the same degree of security as the signature on a credit card receipt (which also provides no real security), but that kind of "security", clearly, doesn't require "invisible" ink in the first place.
Here's a pic of it in action:
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
According to the article, what they're doing is exploiting the fact that most paper has been washed with fluorescent agents to enhance its whiteness, and so will tend to fluoresce somewhat anyway. (It's the same way they make "color safe bleach": It's not bleach. It's fluorescent dye.)
What they may be doing is using the matte properties of printer toner to dull the fluorescent sheen of most of the paper by applying a difficult-to-detect stochastic pattern over the ostensibly white areas of the printout. The areas that are still completely white will seem to fluoresce compared to the areas that have been colored "eggshell white" by the printer. But that's just a guess.
Breakfast served all day!
"Yeah, I'm afraid your Lemon Juice Cartridge was out, so I replaced that. The total bill will be just under $6,000."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Printing invisible ink is pretty nifty, but what they don't tell you is that their standard toner will need to switch from CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) to CMYKL (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, lemon juice).
How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?
As long as they accept my invisible credit card, I'm fine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Stuff starts showing up on your printouts!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Xerox expects that over time, the technology will be used in personalized checks that will have the account holder's signature printed in a fluorescent stripe.
So they want to print my signature, right on the check, in a form that anyone with a UV light can read (even suggesting it is so the mrechant can verify "my" signature that way). How idiotic! First of all, the last thing that I want is my signature printed on the check so that any thief who gets hold of the checkbook can have a sample of what to practice signing my name like (it would be far better to use computer technology to show authorized bank tellers my segnature seperate from the check, easy enough to do with current computer technology). And worse, in an age where anyone can order checks with any account number on them (or even print them themselves), I hardly want the identity theives to be able to print their version of "my signature" on the checks they print so that they can convince someone accepting the check that it's valid because the signature matches.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Like other attempts at security by obscurity, it'll be widely used to "combat terrorism" and then be broken. Us good citizens then have to deal with the crap when it all goes awry. Usual story.
:v)
Vik
I know its not being a proper member of Slashdot if you RTFA, but the idea of a method of printing invisible markings without ink was quite something. Only when reading TFA did I come across this little gem:
He and the group realized that most paper manufacturers already inject fluorescent brightening agents in paper to enchance its "whiteness," so they worked to create certain combinations of toner that would allow the paper's fluorescence to shine through when exposed to ultraviolet light, Eschbach said.Very very clever, but it relies on the presence of fluorescent brightening agents in the paper (these are those "ultra bright/white" paper brands that they charge a premium for). This means that those of you of a tin-foilish predisposition can make use of paper which does not contain these agents in order to prevent your printer making any invisible markings using this technique. Unfortunately this makes counterfeiting not that much easier, as the process that banknotes use to add invisible markings are different to this.
It also means that most company paper will not work (I don't know about other people, but where I worked, the paper was usually the cheapest economy stuff you could find, primarily because they used so much of it).
I can assume that either the premium paper companies are in for a surge in sales from this or all the other brands of paper will start adding these agents and it will become standard. We shall see.
P.S I think the article meant "enhance", not "enchance".
Move along
All this bullcrap about making paper documents more secure is patently stupid. It printed data on a piece of paper. Almost every computer owner has access to a printer. No matter what physical measures are taken to secure something, the only guaranteed result is that the outlaws will develop ever-better techniques to defeat those measures. If there is any real value in counterfeiting whatever uses this invisible ink, then the criminals bent on exploiting these documents will invest the funds necessary to recreate the "magic ink", or do it the easy way and just bribe someone at Xerox. They can forge that heat-sensitive ink we have on our money orders (Canada), I think it's safe to bet they can inject friggin lemon juice into an inkjet cartridge.
A far better solution would be to eliminate the security risk attached to the actual piece of paper, the same way web developers (the good ones at least) don't store sensitive data in cookies. Just put a friggin reference number on the piece of paper, a pointer to some global database of whatever it is you're peddling. Treat the document like a one-time-pad.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
There was a big fuss about UV visible marks on tickets during the recent UEFA Champions League final. Real tickets had a UV visible mark on them so they could be identified as original tickets. If this technology gets into the hands of the public how could you tell between a real or counterfeit ticket?
I saw this technology 2 years ago mated to their docutech print engine, it really make me laugh because it was basically 200,000 inkjet add on to a 300,000 laser printer.... and they mentioned they were having a hard time marketing it and the prototype they had in pasadena disassmbled... i could not understand why....
Yet another Xerox invention that will never make it to market or get snatched by someone else?
As I read it, they're working with the difference in contrast between the ink and the paper background. You throw a UV light on a paper that's fluorescing blue with shiny yellow dots on it that are primarily reflecting the same color (and adding a little bit of their own fluorescence) and the two components have approximately the same luminosity, and they'll look pretty much invisible - the eye can only do just so much detecting colors in this situation. And the overwhelming blue from the paper will effectively hide the dots.
BUT, if you have a long-pass filter in front of your camera (use a filter with a cutoff somewhere between the blue of the paper and the yellow of the dots - you can buy pretty sharp filters from Edmund - and a greyscale camera) then those dots will show up decently against the apparent 'darkness' of the paper.
(I do a bit of UV photography at work using tracer powders and indicators on plastic, metal, paper, and skin, and filters with monochrome cameras work great.)
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
Xerox Business Plan 1.0:
1) GUI
2) GI Joe
3)
4) Profit!
now i can print more secure airline boarding passes!
How secure will this printing method be once these printers show up at Kinko's?
To make things worse, how will you know when it really runs out?
I'd like all workgroup printers to print the user name, the document name, the printer name, the date and time of printing and the page number (and the total number of pages if this can be precalculated) on (say along the top) of each page output. That way, we could identify who printed the piles of uncollected printout that appear next to our printers. Our users consider printing this visibly an intrusion, and header sheets get separated from the rest of the document (stapling them to the rest of the document is considered a nuisance even when the document is thin enough to permit this to be done).
Well, my company just spent close to 200 bucks for an inkjet cartridge (yes, one) for our new postage meter. Not quite the same, but pretty freakin expensive...
This guy's the limit!
Isn't "hiding" text on a document using invisible inks, just security through obscurity? Once the document forgers realise it's there, they'll simply start printing this additional layer itself. It's about as effective as hiding your extranet web server by changing it's port from port 80 to something else.
(1) Remove color cartridge from printer
(2) Purchase sheaf of non-fluorescent paper -- probably any enviro paper will do
(3) Stop and release that I rarely print anything, and even more rarely print something that matters
(4) Return to watching Americans get beat at the French Open
I come here for the love
And would buy an UV light promptly. Hidden meta data on printouts is simply a golden idea!
So you work for the government?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
They've been buying those invisible planes for quite a while now...
"Yes Sir, General Smith. The totally stealthed invisible plane is right over there."
"No Sir, of course you can't see it. It's invisible."
"Well, we think that we can produce them for about $2 billion each, Sir."
"500. No problem. We'll have them ready in three weeks."
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
...but you've been Snoped:
Cash Cow
On a more serious note, since your printers these days secretly rat-you-out by printing subtle identifying information that will let the feds track you down just by inspecting a page you've printed, is this an even more subtle way to implement that "feature"?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
83 comments and no "Move along now, nothing to see here" post?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?