A Construction of Fake QR Codes Based on Error-Correcting Codes

QR codes are used for various applications, such as access to web pages and to make a settlement. Although users can visually recognize the existence of the QR codes, they need to use dedicated QR code decoder for reading the stored information in the codes. A malicious one creates a fake QR code by making bad use of this feature and guides users to a malicious web page with a careless operation by the users. However, because fake QR codes always guided to a malicious site, the users detect the fake QR code by looking it at attentively and take measures at an early stage. In this paper, we propose a construction method of fake QR codes which are hard to detect by a characteristic of the error correcting codes. Through evaluation experiments, we clarify the risk of the fake QR codes and call attention to this QR codes.