Searching for uncopyable key made of sparkles in plastic

[R. A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


Status:  U
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 14:45:43 -0400
To: cypherpunks at lne.com
From: Peter Wayner <pcw2 at flyzone.com>
Subject: Searching for uncopyable key made of sparkles in plastic
Sender: owner-cypherpunks at 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

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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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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