  In this paper, we propose a novel paper fingerprinting technique based on
analyzing the translucent patterns revealed when a light source shines through
the paper. These patterns represent the inherent texture of paper, formed by
the random interleaving of wooden particles during the manufacturing process.
We show these patterns can be easily captured by a commodity camera and
condensed into to a compact 2048-bit fingerprint code. Prominent works in this
area (Nature 2005, IEEE S&P 2009, CCS 2011) have all focused on fingerprinting
paper based on the paper "surface". We are motivated by the observation that
capturing the surface alone misses important distinctive features such as the
non-even thickness, the random distribution of impurities, and different
materials in the paper with varying opacities. Through experiments, we
demonstrate that the embedded paper texture provides a more reliable source for
fingerprinting than features on the surface. Based on the collected datasets,
we achieve 0% false rejection and 0% false acceptance rates. We further report
that our extracted fingerprints contain 807 degrees-of-freedom (DoF), which is
much higher than the 249 DoF with iris codes (that have the same size of 2048
bits). The high amount of DoF for texture-based fingerprints makes our method
extremely scalable for recognition among very large databases; it also allows
secure usage of the extracted fingerprint in privacy-preserving authentication
schemes based on error correction techniques.
