Taking the Fingerprint of a Piece of Paper

Scientific American has a short article on-line about “finding” the fingerprint of virtually any surface, such as paper, cardboard or plastic. By bouncing a laser off of the surface and measuring how the light scatters, researchers can identify one piece of paper from a package… and the fingerprint does not change even if the paper is abused.

See Paper’s Natural Fingerprint Could Be Built-In Passport Protection.

This brings into focus the need to accurately identify a physical artifact, such as an identity card or document, as being the document which was issued by some authority. I can imagine a government taking the fingerprint of every page of a passport and thereby being able to ascertain whether any single page had been replaced.