A new patent filed by Chinese technology giant Lenovo, would seek the use of blockchain technology to verify the validity of physical documents.
First introduced in August 2016, Lenovo uses a configuration that uses digital signatures encoded in physical documents. These can be processed by computers and other devices, to verify the legitimacy of a document,
As could be seen in a request published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) last Thursday, La máquina, performs a procedure in which it decodes the signature and transforms it into a digital map of the document, for later have the possibility to compare it with the physical copy of it.
The specific request, that the digital signature represents a security blockchain, with each digital signature represented by a block in the security chain. Lenovo qualifies its blockchain as "a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of data records protected against tampering and revision."
Also, it says that each block contains "information about the physical document at various times".
About your product Lenovo says that:
Using the security blockchain, anyone can validate that they have the current authentic physical document, even if there are several hard copies and several people have made entries in the modification chain. If there are fakes, they will appear as orphaned blocks in the chain. To validate a paper copy, a user of the electronic device takes an image of the code printed on the physical document.
The benefit of this product, is that any copy that has another part, can be verified that they are an exact one of the original and it has not been altered later in some point.
This is not the first time that Lenovo ventures with blockchain technology. Last year according to Forbes, Lenovo in partnership with IBM had started working on a blockchain-based billing system. The report stated that the objective of the project was to make the billing and operational processes simpler and more transparent.