itself to use in authentication. Various systems have been invented to allow authors to provide a means for readers to reliably authenticate that a given message originated from or was relayed by them. These involve authentication factors like: A difficult-to-reproduce physical artifact, such as a seal, signature, watermark, special stationery, or fingerprint. A shared secret, such as a passphrase, in the content of the message. An electronic signature; public-key infrastructure is often used to cryptographically guarantee that a message has been signed by the holder of a particular private key. The opposite problem is the detection of plagiarism, where information from a different author is passed off as a person's own work. A common technique for proving plagiarism is the discovery of another copy of the same or very similar text, which has different attribution. In some cases, excessively high quality or a style mismatch may raise suspicion of plagiarism. Literacy and literature authentication In literacy, authentication is a readers’ process of questioning the veracity of an aspect of literature and then verifying those questions via research. The fundamental question for authentication of literature is – Does one believe it? Related to that, an authentication project is therefore a reading and writing activity in which students document the relevant research process (). It builds students' critical literacy. The documentation materials for literature go beyond narrative texts and likely include informational texts, primary sources, and multimedia. The process typically involves both internet and hands-on library research. When authenticating historical fiction in particular, readers consider the extent that the major historical events, as well as the culture portrayed (e.g., the language, clothing, food, gender roles), are believable for the period. History and state-of-the-art Historically, fingerprints have been used as the most authoritative method of authentication, but court cases in the US and elsewhere have raised fundamental doubts about fingerprint reliability. Outside of the legal system as well, fingerprints are easily spoofable, with British Telecom's top computer security official noting that "few" fingerprint readers have not already been tricked by one spoof or another. Hybrid or two-tiered authentication methods offer a compelling the solution, such as private keys encrypted by fingerprint inside of a USB device. In a computer data context, cryptographic methods have been developed which are not spoofable if the originator's key has not been compromised. That the originator (or anyone other than an attacker) knows (or doesn't know) about a