Paper Fingerprints Could Protect Forgery

The best way to protect documents from fraud may lie in their microscopic "fingerprints."

All non-reflective surfaces have naturally occurring, random imperfections. These unique imperfections could provide built-in security for passports, IDs, credit cards, and pharmaceutical packaging.

The surface fingerprints could be read using a low-cost portable laser scanner, making expensive holograms and special ink marks a thing of the past.

Not even the inventors would be able to create fraudulent copies since there is no manufacturing process for copying surface imperfections at the microscopic level.

"The beauty of this system is that there is no need to modify the item being protected in any way with tags, chips or inks," said lead author Russell Cowburn. "It's as if documents and packaging have their own unique DNA. This makes protection covert, low-cost, simple to integrate into the manufacturing process and immune to attacks against the security feature itself."

This research was published in a July issue of Nature.