[13995] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Searching for uncopyable key made of sparkles in plastic
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (R. A. Hettinga)
Tue Sep 2 15:43:10 2003
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Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 15:20:15 -0400
To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>
Cc: mac_crypto@vmeng.com
--- begin forwarded text
Status: U
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 14:45:43 -0400
To: cypherpunks@lne.com
From: Peter Wayner <pcw2@flyzone.com>
Subject: Searching for uncopyable key made of sparkles in plastic
Sender: owner-cypherpunks@lne.com
Several months ago, I read about someone who was making a key that
was difficult if not "impossible" to copy. They mixed sparkly things
into a plastic resin and let them set. A camera would take a picture
of the object and pass the location of the sparkly parts through a
hash function to produce the numerical key represented by this hunk
of plastic. That numerical value would unlock documents.
This was thought to be very difficult to copy because the sparkly
items were arranged at random. Arranging all of the sparkly parts in
the right sequence and position was thought to be beyond the limits
of precision for humans.
Can anyone give me a reference to this paper/project?
Thanks!
-Peter
--- end forwarded text
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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