Authentication of Physical Documents

Current Members

Past Members

Kevin Tang

Introduction

Despite the digitalization of many processes in today’s society, we still use traditional means of communication like physical letters delivered to our homes. Under certain conditions, senders using this type of communication can safely assume that only the intended recipient can read the (unaltered) letter since the recipient’s mailbox is secured by their personal physical key. However, this is not the case in the opposite direction. Namely, recipients do not have the guarantee that the letter indeed comes from the sender advertised on it, nor that that the letter was unaltered during transport.

The goal of this project is the development of protocols, techniques, tools, and supporting software for the cryptographic authentication of physical documents. Supporting software includes a mobile app that allows end-users to scan a QR code printed on a physical document to verify its authenticity.

Topics relevant for this project include:

Formal Verification (security protocols, software)
Programming (mobile apps development)
Security Engineering
Software Engineering
Cryptography (asymmetric crytpo, PKI)
Computer Vision (OCR, image recognition)

This project is part of the Centre for Cyber Trust, a joint effort of the Information Security, Programming Methodology, and Network Security Group at ETH Zurich, as well as the Usable Security and Privacy Group at University of Bonn.