Mitigating the Challenge of Hardcopy Document Forgery

The issue of hardcopy document forgery is still prevalent. In South Africa, a series of cases have been reported where academic documents are forged. This poses a problem of integrity, trust and authentication of hardcopy documents. Therefore, it is vital to have a system that could verify a hardcopy document and ensure that the integrity is maintained at all times. Various techniques have been introduced to eliminate the issue of document forgery, namely; cryptographic hashing, 2D barcodes, Digital Signatures and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). In this paper, we present our proposed solution which comprises the 4 techniques. The first part of the implementation included the use of OCR and the experimental results yielded an accuracy of 100%. While this is on-going work, the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution.