Security Printing Techniques Based on Substrate and Print-Process Individualities

According to the international chamber of commerce: "the international trade in counterfeit and pirated goods costs the world economy about 250 billion USD annually." Economic losses from this phenomenon "put over 2.5 million legitimate jobs at risk in the G20 countries" (ICC, 2009). One way to minimize these effects is to protect products with security features. This paper investigates the status quo in the security printing world based on substrate and print-process individualities. The authors present the milestones in the development of security printing applications and review relevant works in this field. Based on the reviews a categorisation of the presented techniques is created arranging them in groups with respect to their reliability, security, speed, complexity of the extraction/verification device, and nature (extrinsic/intrinsic). At the end, three common use cases are reviewed and the technologies which are suitable for these cases are proposed.