Safeart: a digital signature-based anti-counterfeit system for art

It is well known that the world of art (paintings, sculptures, graphics etc) is plagued by the virus of counterfeits and this issue is particularly sensible in a country like Italy where art has flourished for centuries and where in the XX century too many pieces of art of great painters were copied and/or counterfeited and sold for authentic. Counterfeiting is a crime which involve great amounts of money and is perpetrated at all levels, with no exclusion of the greatest art dealers. Once a style or painter has had success it is even too simple to find a epigone which either can copy a single painting or paints according to one particular style. Great examples in Italy are Morandi, De Chirico, Vedova etc. artists with a well defined (and therefore easy to copy) style. In our university we have developed and implemented a digital system which can prove without any doubt the authenticity of a piece of art and which is tamper-proof at all levels.