Timeline for Protecting Seals from Forgery
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 21, 2019 at 11:55 | comment | added | Klaus Æ. Mogensen | @MontyWild The OP also stated that his world was "very Earthlike", not exactly like Earth. Some minor changes, like the discovery of radioactivity a half century earlier, are surely permittable if that solves the problem. It might even be on the order of secret history - maybe radioactivity was, in fact, discovered before Curie, but kept secret. | |
| Oct 21, 2019 at 10:43 | comment | added | Monty Wild♦ | @KlausÆ.Mogensen The OP stated Early Victorian... and the Curies who discovered Radium died of radiation-related illnesses. Of course, there were other hazardous occupations during the Victorian era, such as hatters who went mad from exposure to mercury, and matchstick makers, who suffered from Phossy Jaw, but there's no need to add Royal Wax makers to the list of hazardous occupations. | |
| Oct 21, 2019 at 8:00 | comment | added | Klaus Æ. Mogensen | @MontyWild Radioactivity was discovered in 1896, late Victorian era. It is not too much of a stretch to assume that a pseudo-Victorian society discovered it a bit earlier, but that the discovery was kept secret by the authorities. | |
| Oct 19, 2019 at 22:50 | comment | added | Monty Wild♦ | Wasn't producing radioactive materials on demand a bit advanced for the Victorian era? Not to mention that exposure to radiation is not a particularly healthy thing to do. | |
| Oct 19, 2019 at 11:06 | comment | added | IMSoP | Have you heard of "Kerckhoff's Principle" (I think I spelled that right)? It's the idea that a system of encryption or signing should continue to be effective even if an attacker knows the exact method employed. To apply it to this case, what we would want is some pattern of radioactivity where the procedure to verify it can be public, but not give you enough information to forge it. | |
| Oct 17, 2019 at 12:40 | comment | added | nzaman | I completely agree. The issue is that for the seal to be useful, the people who need to check the validity of the document need to know what to look for. The more people using seals as verification, the more people need to be aware of the security text criteria, the more likely someone, somewhere will come up with a means to spoof it. You simply cannot trust seals in the long term as a security measure, except for rare, one-off documents, where you can make the seal too expensive to reproduce. | |
| Oct 17, 2019 at 12:34 | comment | added | Klaus Æ. Mogensen | @nzaman: You are right in that the method only works as long as the secret is kept - but can't that be said of any method? If the authorities can use the method, it will be possible for forgers with enough resources to replicate it. The point is that this secret may be hard to find, especially if radioactivity sensors are rare. | |
| Oct 17, 2019 at 11:50 | comment | added | nzaman | You would expect to find manganese in old seals. Unless the validity of the seal expires within the year, a forger will almost certainly be producing backdated documents most of the time. If they don't add Mn to the wax, they'll be caught. Once the business with the Fe-55 is known, as it will be, forgers will start preparing different mixes of wax for the year of the forged document. | |
| Oct 17, 2019 at 9:49 | comment | added | Starfish Prime | Making artificial isotopes might be impractical, but concentrating natural decay products might be more practical. I like the time-dependent nature of the magical ingredient here, which can be cross-checked with the date of the sealed document. | |
| Oct 17, 2019 at 9:16 | comment | added | Klaus Æ. Mogensen | @ALambentEye: As per the article I link to, Iron-55 is most effectively produced by irradiation of iron with neutrons. | |
| Oct 17, 2019 at 9:15 | history | edited | Klaus Æ. Mogensen | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 97 characters in body
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| Oct 17, 2019 at 9:12 | comment | added | A Lambent Eye | How is Iron-55 produced? | |
| Oct 17, 2019 at 9:11 | history | answered | Klaus Æ. Mogensen | CC BY-SA 4.0 |