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QR Codes As Anti-Forgery On Currency Could Infect Banks

Posted by timothy on from the fiat-money's-been-hacked-long-ago dept.

New submitter planetzuda writes "Invisible nano QR codes have been proposed as a way to stop forgery of U.S. currency by students of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Unfortunately QR codes are easy to forge and can send you to a site that infects your system. Banks would most likely need to scan currency that have QR codes to ensure the authenticity of the bill. If the QR code was forged it could infect the bank with a virus."

2 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. Huh? by ccccc · · Score: 5, Informative

    A QR code is a two-dimensional barcode. A pretty decent way to embed a serial number. What exactly about the idea makes the poster believe the banks' scanning software would jump to some arbitrary website after the scan? Presumably, a much more sane and secure thing to do would be to look up the serial number in a database on a single, secure site.

  2. WTF? by iYk6 · · Score: 5, Informative

    QR Codes don't send you anywhere. They're just data. They can contain web links, just like any written sentence, but a device won't download the content at a linked URL unless it is programmed to.

    QR codes are futuristic, 2D versions of bar codes. Nothing more.