A simple way to determine the uniqueness of a piece of paper

    US security experts have found a simple way to reliably determine the uniqueness of paper documents using a cheap household scanner. They proved that even at a resolution of 600 dpi, you can identify the structure of a blank sheet of paper and build on its basis a 3D model that will be unique to this particular sheet.

    The technology can be widely used to verify the authenticity of paper documents, including passports, banknotes, tickets, etc. In addition, the technology can be used to determine the true origin of “anonymous” paper artifacts, such as ballot papers.

    This is what a sheet of paper looks like under a microscope.



    Individual wood fibers that form a unique pattern are clearly visible.

    If you scan a sheet on an ordinary household scanner, the picture will appear white, but if you select a small fragment of the image and adjust the contrast, the result will be something like this.



    Dark areas form where, due to the structure of the paper, a shadow forms from the scanner lamp. If you turn the sheet and scan again, the shadows will fall at a different angle. This allows us to make a three-dimensional model of a piece of paper surface. For example, if there is text printed on a laser printer on the sheet, areas with toner particles will clearly rise above the surface.



    Scientists have published the results of their work in the work “Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners” , which will be published in the May issue of the journal“Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy .

    via Freedom to Tinker (blog of one of the authors of the study)

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