Will Clarkson will present his research seminar/general exam on Thursday January 15 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are; Ed Felten (advisor), Adam Finkelstein, and Andrew Appel. Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. ----------------------------------------------- Abstract: I will discuss a new technique for authenticating physical documents by using random, naturally occurring imperfections in paper texture. I will show how the three-dimensional surface of a page can be measured using only a commodity scanner and without modifying the document in any way. Using measurements of this physical feature, a concise fingerprint is generated that uniquely identifies the document. This method is secure against counterfeiting, robust to harsh handling, and applicable even before any content is printed on a page. It has a wide range of applications, including detecting forged currency and tickets, authenticating passports, and halting counterfeit goods. On a more sinister note, document identification could be used to de-anonymize printed surveys and to compromise the secrecy of paper ballots. Books: 1. R. J. Anderson. Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems. Wiley Publishing, 2008. Selected Sections/Chapters: Part 1: All, Part 2:11-16 (Security Printing and Seals, Biometrics, Physical Tamper Resistance) 2. N. Ferguson and B. Schneier. Practical Cryptography. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 2003. Papers: 1. B. Zhu, J. Wu, and M. S. Kankanhalli. Print signatures for document authentication. In Proc. 10th ACM Confernce on Computer and Communications Security, pages 145-154, 2003. 2. E. Metois, P. Yarin, N. Salzman, and J. R. Smith. FiberFingerprint identification. In Proc. Third Workshop on Automatic Identification, pages 147-154, 2002. 3. A. Juels and M. Wattenberg. A fuzzy commitment scheme. pages 28-36. ACM Press, 1999. 4. Y. Dodis, R. Ostrovsky, L. Reyzin, and A. Smith. Fuzzy extractors: How to generate strong keys from biometrics and other noisy data. SIAM Journal on Computing, 38(1):97-137, 2008. 5. N. R. Wagner. Fingerprinting. In SP '83: Proceedings of the 1983 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, page 18, Washington, DC, USA, 1983. IEEE Computer Society. 6. N. Degara-Quintela and F. Perez-Gonzalez. Visible encryption: using paper as a secure channel. volume 5020, pages 413-422. SPIE, 2003. 7. R. P. Cowburn, J. D. R. Buchanan, and P. R. Seem. Scanner authentication. US patent application 2008/0044096, June 2007. 8. I. Amidror. A new print-based security strategy for the protection of valuable documents and products using moire intensity profiles. In Proceedings of the SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering, volume 4677 of Proc. SPIE - Int. Soc. Opt. Eng. (USA), pages 89-100. SPIE-Int. Soc. Opt. Eng, 2002. Lab. de Systemes Peripheriques (LSP), Ecole Polytech. Fed. de Lausanne, Switzerland. 9. J. Daugman. High confidence visual recognition of persons by a test of statistical independence. In IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, volume 15, pages 1148-1161, November 93. 10. David J. Hurley, B. Arbab-Zavar, and Mark A. Nixon. The Ear as a Biometric, November 2007.