CHECKING LEGITIMACY OF A REQUEST FOR A FUNCTION TO BE RELEASED

摘要

1476137 Selective signalling DASY INTER SA 28 May 1974 23653/74 Heading G4H Legitimacy of a request for a function to be released is checked by presenting an I.D. document and a document of request provided with respective sets of data one or which sets consists of partial information together with or including data specifying a mathematical function other than equality and the other of which consists of partial information alone machine-transferring the set of data on one document to the other to provide a total information thereon, and machine-checking the total information for legitimacy by determining whether a predetermined one of the two partial informations is related to the other one by the said mathematical function. The function document and the I.D. document could be a cheque and cheque card respectively, or a traveller's cheque and passport respectively. The machine-transferring could be by magnetic copying, or the data could be transferred by entering it on a keyboard. The data specifying a mathematical function could be a separate digit, the function being, e.g. multiplication by this digit. Alternatively, one of the digits of the partial information could specify the function as well as being one of the digits of, say, passport number. In the latter case, which digit of the passport number represents the function could be predetermined and fixed or could be randomly selected in which case all of them are tried during verification. Other functions mentioned are addition, subtraction, division by predetermined divisors, rooting, cube-rooting, taking logs.