Forensics Characterization of Printers and Image Capture devices

Oct 18, 2006

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Abstract

The falling cost and wide availability of electronic devices have led to their
widespread use by individuals, corporations, and governments. These devices,
such as computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and printers, all contain
various sensors which generate data that are stored or transmitted
to another device. One example of this is a security system containing a
network of video cameras, temperature sensors, alarms, computers, and other
devices. In such a network, it is important to be able to trust the data from
each of these sensors. Forensic techniques can be used to uniquely identify
each device using the data it produces. This is different from simply securing
the data being sent across the network because we are also authenticating the
sensor that is creating the data.

Forensic characterization of a device allows identification of the type of
device, make, model, configuration, and other characteristics based solely on
observation of the data that the device produces. These characteristics
that uniquely identify a device are called device signatures. As an example,
the noise characteristics in a digital image can be used as a signature of the
camera that produced it. Similarly, the ‘‘noise'' characteristics of a print
engine can be used as a signature of the printer that generated a document.

This talk will present current research and techniques for forensic
characterization of printers and image capture devices such as digital
cameras and scanners.