Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners

Today, Tim Weyrich, Adam Finkelstein, Nadia Heninger, J. Alex Halderman, Ed Felten and I released our study on Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners. This result shows that individual sheets of paper are identifiable by their unique surface texture. The uniqueness of a document’s surface texture is the result of a random deposit of paper fibers during the manufacturing process. By exploiting a property of desktop scanners we are able to accurately and consistently measure the surface texture of a document, extract a fingerprint.
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New Building

The Center for Information Technology (CITP) has moved into a new building. Sherrerd Hall is the wonderful new glass building across the way from the Computer Science building. We’ve got most of the 3rd floor as we tackle upcoming policy issues.


SherrerdHall

You can reach us at:

CITP
Sherrerd Hall, 3rd Floor
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08540

Or contact us via our website

Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys

Alex Halderman, Seth Schoen, Nadia Heninger, William Paul, Joe Calandrino, Ari Feldman, Jacob Appelbaum, Ed Felten and I released a paper on Thursday about our research on encryption keys that remain in memory even after the computer has been shutdown. The period of data remanence varies dramatically with temperature. We also describe ways to cool down the memory modules using common "canned air" products.

You can read the paper, get access to source code, and some videos explaining our result in more detail here.