July 26, 2009
School of Engineering, Bangalore
 
A student paper authored by B Tech (ECE) students of Amrita’s Bangalore Campus has been accepted for presentation at the Third International Conference on Anti-counterfeiting, Security, and Identification in Communication (ICASID 09) to be held at the City University of Hong Kong, August 20-22. Co-sponsored by the IEEE Hong Kong Chapter, the conference will have participants from several countries around the world.
 
Amrita students, B. Sriram and R. Prashanth Iyer, will travel to Hong Kong in August to present their paper. Titled, Mark Sheet Authentication using 2D Barcodes and Digital Signatures, the paper was based on a student project for implementing a document authenticator.
 
The students have developed what may well be India’s first such system.
 
“Today, we often hear about important documents such as university-issued marks sheets being fudged and faked,” stated Prof. S. Ravishankar, who guided the students. “Authentication of such documents is a major concern and currently, there are no proven methods to generate a secure document. Our students have developed an authenticator with line verification capability. A document may have any amount of content, the authenticator is not limited to documents of particular sizes.”
 
The students explained further. “All important parameters in a mark sheet are encrypted and encoded into a 2D barcode. When verifying, the 2D barcode is decoded and decrypted; the original data is displayed by the application’s graphical user interface. We have included OCR into the application also. This OCR text is automatically compared with the original data from the 2D barcode. Since the system is completely automated, there is no room for human error.”
 
A similar approach was also proposed by a multinational firm, Hewlett Packard, for a document verification system. However that system required online connectivity during the time of use. The system developed by the students is not dependent on online connectivity. A digital signature can be used for authenticating the contents of the document. This provides for local authentication without having to connect to an online database.
 
Overall, the students used three technologies to develop their system. 1) 2D Barcode for machine reading capability 2) OCR for automatic verification of the correctness of each and every entry in the mark-sheet 3) Digital Signature for authentication. We congratulate the students for their efforts.