Texture to the Rescue

Abstract

Abstract-In this paper, we propose a novel paper fingerprinting technique based on analyzing the translucent patterns revealed when a light source shines through the paper. These patterns represent the inherent texture of paper, formed by the random interleaving of wooden particles during the manufacturing process. We show these patterns can be easily captured by a commodity camera and condensed into to a compact 2048-bit fingerprint code. Prominent works in this area (Nature 2005, IEEE S&P 2009, CCS 2011 have all focused on fingerprinting paper based on the paper "surface". We are motivated by the observation that capturing the surface alone misses important distinctive features such as the non-even thickness, the random distribution of impurities, and different materials in the paper with varying opacities. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the embedded paper texture provides a more reliable source for fingerprinting than features on the surface. Based on the collected datasets, we achieve 0% false rejection and 0% false acceptance rates. We further report that our extracted fingerprints contain 807 degrees-of-freedom (DoF), which is much higher than the 249 DoF with iris codes (that have the same size of 2048 bits). The high amount of DoF for texture-based fingerprints makes our method extremely scalable for recognition among very large databases; it also allows secure usage of the extracted fingerprint in privacy-preserving authentication schemes based on error correction techniques.

Transparency Enhancing Technologies to Make Security Protocols Work for Humans

“…Mechanisms that provide cryptographic-like mechanisms to authenticate certain physical objects do exist, however. For example, there is a body of work has been done to study how specific paper documents could be authenticated based on their physical characteristics [43], [51], [85], [117], [165], [173], [190], [193], [199]. This would allow the document to be logged with its fingerprint, allowing it to be authenticated later if required.…”