An Overview and Applications of Val-Code ® : Digital Watermarking Technology for Printed Documents

Computer generated electronic documents can be protected from the threat of information leakage and tampering by using security technologies, such as encryption and digital signatures. Electronic documents can also be used directly as digital input on other computer systems. Once such an electronic document is printed out and made into a printed document, however, it can no longer be protected from information leakage and tampering and it also becomes difficult to directly utilize the document again as digital data. In this paper, we provide an overview of Val-Code® *1) technology that we are developing to resolve such issues and introduce applications in which its features are incorporated.