Nearly all types of paper, plastic and packaging have unique microscopic imperfections or fingerprints on their surface that could be used as a cheaper way to prevent fraud, scientists said on Wednesday (July 27).
The identity code is virtually impossible to change and can be easily read with a portable laser scanner to combat the forgery of passports, ID cards and other documents.
"Our findings open up the way to a new and much simpler approach to authentication and tracking," said Russell Cowburn, a professor of nanotechnology at Imperial College London.
"This is a system so secure that not even the inventors would be able to crack it since there is no known manufacturing process for copying surface imperfections at the necessary level of precision," he added.
Nanotechnology involves the manipulation of materials on an atomic or molecular scale.
"The beauty of this system is that there is no need to modify the item being protected in any way with tags, chips or ink - it's as if documents and packaging have their own unique DNA," Cowburn explained in a statement.
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