‘Four Nations’ Common Adversarial Analysis Assessment Methodology

The Four Nations group was founded in 1978 and consists of five central bank members – the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Bank of Canada, Reserve Bank of Australia, Bank of England and Banco de México. The group is a forum in which its members share information and experiences on banknote development, issuance and distribution, counterfeit deterrence, and relevant technical studies.

The group also provides an avenue for the members to collaborate on projects of common interest and confidentially share information in a meaningful way, such as the continuous sharing of adversarial analysis conducted by each central bank. This information exchange has proven to be enlightening and invaluable for all the central banks.

However, the group had no means to directly compare the adversarial analysis work performed by each central bank since each member assessed security features through their own unique methods and criteria. In 2015, a Four Nations working group began a collaborative project to create a common language and assessment system to enable the direct comparison of public overt adversarial analysis samples and results generated by each Four Nations member.