| Sumario: | The article reports on printer forensics and the effort to make documents traceable. Desktop counterfeiters have little reason to worry about prison because the systems they use are ubiquitous and there is no means of tracing forged documents to the machine that produced them. This may soon change thanks to technology developed by George Chiu, Jan Allebach and Edward Delp, three anti-counterfeiting engineers based at Purdue University in Indiana. The results of their research will be unveiled formally on November 5th at the International Conference on Digital Printing Technologies in Salt Lake City. Though the approaches of the three researchers differ slightly, all are based on detecting imperfections in the print quality of documents. The researchers from Purdue employ a similar approach, exploiting the fact that the rotating drums and mirrors inside a printer are imperfect pieces of engineering which leave unique patterns of banding in their products. Although these patterns are invisible to the naked eye, they can be detected and analysed by computer programs, and it is these that the three researchers have spent the past year devising. So far, they cannot trace individual printers, but they can tell pretty reliably which make and model of printer was used to create a document. The current techniques used to secure documents are either digital or too costly for widespread applications. Using the banding patterns of printers to secure documents would be both cheap to implement and hard, if not impossible, for those without specialist knowledge and hardware to evade.
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