Paper Fingerprints

There is a paper in this week's Nature that takes advantage of something I've never really thought of before, but should have: No two pieces of paper are exactly alike.

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On the microscopic level, there are variations in the arrangement of the fibers and such. The authors report that they can scan paper with a laser and transform those irregularities into a digital code, which can be used as a fingerprint. They were able to re-scan and successfully reproduce the fingerprint after the paper was soaked, baked, or crinkled up and then flattened out. This would also work for plastic and cardboard.

Most existing security validation schemes rely on a proprietary manufacturing process that would be difficult for a fraudster to reproduce (for example, holograms or security inks). Our findings open the way to a new approach to authentication and tracking — even the inventors would not be able to carry out a physical attack on this fingerprint as there is no known manufacturing process for copying surface imperfections at the required level of precision. There is no need to modify the protected item in any way through the addition of tags, chips or inks, so protection is covert, low-cost, simple to integrate into the manufacturing process, and immune to attacks directed against the security feature itself.

A patent has been filed. I wish I had thought of that.