Computer and software manufacturers are to be forced to introduce new security measures to make it impossible for their products to be used to copy banknotes.The move, to be drafted into European Union legislation by the year end, follows a surge in counterfeit currency produced using laser printers, home scanners and graphics software. Imaging software and printers have become so powerful and affordable that production of fake banknotes has become a booming cottage industry.
mandatory banknote detection – bwaahahahhaahahahaha
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2 responses to “mandatory banknote detection – bwaahahahhaahahahaha”
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re: mandatory banknote detection – bwaahahahhaahahahaha
There’s a nifty section in Ross Anderson’s “Security Engineering” book on the anti-forgery techniques employed in current British banknotes. In addition to the obvious holograms, there’s concentric circles in various places which will give moire fringes, resulting in blobs, when scanned using current leasding-edge resolution scanners – also there’s the nifty colour transitions in the same line and tiny “Bank of England” legends in some of the ribbony bits.
However, while the moire fringe stuff results in a note reproduction which is clearly duff, failures to reproduce some of the more subtle anti-forgery measures won’t be readily viewable to the naked eye, especially in poor lighting conditions.
This raises the interesting issue of whether an anti-forgery technique is a good one if failure to reproduce the technique on a forgery still results in a note which people will accept as genuine. It probably isn’t, IMHO.
When you get to the point of weaving radioactively tagged threads into the medium from which notes are made, such that the unique pattern of threads can be mapped to a note’s serial number, that’s probably going too far unless you’re specifically after the very large-scale forgers. On the other hand, one of the biggest breaks of a forging ring happened because the $100 bills they were making *didn’t* have traces of cocaine on them – 90-something percent of genuine $100 bills do, apparently…
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re: mandatory banknote detection – bwaahahahhaahahahaha
what i find amusing is the notion that open-source authors of (say) GIMP are going to waste time, effort and CPU cycles to implement this circle-pattern-detection algorithm, especially in the face of the source-code being available…
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