[33176] in bugtraq
Re: HP printers and currency anti-copying measures
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sami Haahtinen)
Wed Jan 21 20:30:21 2004
To: bugtraq@securityfocus.com
From: Sami Haahtinen <ressu@ressukka.net>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 08:05:04 +0200
Message-ID: <bul4qh$bfi$1@sea.gmane.org>
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In-Reply-To: <400D387D.30701@mightye.org>
mightye[removethis] wrote:
> Or use Photoshop 7, 6, 5.5, 5, etc. I seriously doubt that there are
> any advancements in newer versions of Photoshop which make
> counterfitting significantly easier. Scanning is scanning, and given
> that what you're trying to do is reproduce an existing image, not create
> a new one, the editing features found in new versions of Photoshop will
> provide very little advantage in this regard aside maybe from a little
> clean up of dirt on the glass of the scanner.
Actually the Photoshop restriction works pretty well when scanning the
bills, we ofcourse had to test this as soon as we saw the announcement.
What was dissapointing was the way it worked, even if we embedded the
bill in to a bigger image it was still able to spot it from there, we
didn't ofcourse go as far as we could have with the trickery, but it
turned out to work pretty well.
What was even more disappointing was that if we used the same scanner
tools and saved the bill in to a TIFF file and loaded it from there to
Photoshop, we were able to open and edit the image. Again, we didn't
want to push our luck and print the bill with a color laser, but it was
enough to convince us of a good attempt, and a bad implementation.
I do know that the Adobe had to think about the users while creating
this block, some users might need the ability to load an image of some
worlds currency and embedd it in to an image, but this leaves a big loop
hole. If i was a counterfitter, i wouldn't settle for 'hey, you can't
scan this' and i would look for other means to scan the bill.
Regards, Sami
