Low-Cost Anti-Copying 2D Barcode by Exploiting Channel Noise Characteristics

In this paper, to overcome the drawbacks of prior approaches for defending against Illegally-Copying (IC) attacks, such as low generality, high cost, and high overhead, we propose a Low-Cost Anti-Copying (LCAC) 2D barcode by exploiting the difference between the noise characteristics of legal and illegal channels. An embedding strategy is proposed, and for a variant of this strategy, we also perform a corresponding analysis. To accurately evaluate the performance of our approach, a theoretical model of the noise in an illegal channel is established by using a generalized Gaussian distribution. By comparing the experimental results based on various printers, scanners, and mobile phones, it can be found that the sample histogram and fitting curve of the theoretical model match well, so it can be concluded that the theoretical model works well. To evaluate the security of the proposed LCAC code, in addition to the Direct-Copying (DC) attack, an improved version, called the Synthesized-Copying (SC) attack, is also considered in this paper. Based on the theoretical model, we build a prediction function to optimize the parameters of our approach. Parameters optimization seeks a tradeoff between the production cost and the cost of IC attacks. The experimental results show that the proposed LCAC code with two printers and two scanners can detect DC attacks effectively and resist SC attacks up to the access of 14 legal copies.