Slashdot Mirror
Biometric Face Recognition Exploit
clscott writes "A researcher
at the U. of Ottawa has developed an exploit to which most
biometric systems are probably vulnerable.
He developed an algorithm which allows a fairly high
quality image of a person to be regenerated from a
face recognition template. Three commercial face rec.
algorithms were tested and in all cases the image could
masquerade to the algorithm as the target person.
Here are links to a
talk
and a
paper.
Unfortunately, biometric templates are currently considered
to be non-identifiable, much like a password hash.
This means that
legislation gets passed to require
hundreds of millions of people to have their biometrics
encoded onto their passports. This kind of vulnerability
could mean that anyone who reads these documents has access
to the holders fingerprint, iris images, etc."
(P.S. Please no replies from humor-impaired folks.)
maybe i should extend my tin-foil hat to a tin-foil facemask and a pair of shiny gloves... that way they'll never recognise me!
I'm glad to know that someone legit found this out before it got into the hands of those evil terrorists . Seriously, it's great that these kinds of things are being discovered now. It just goes to show that no matter what, things can be hacked/bypassed/etc somehow.
The fallibility of biometric systems has been widely known since a scientific expose was released on the topic no less than five years ago.
**Guy snooping on a girl sunbathing**
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Expression on the Project Manager's face after he realized he should have installed a better door: Priceless
There were so many different ways in
which you were required to provide absolute proof of your iden-
tity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome
just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential
problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an
epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash
point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around
waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits
of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant
(or nearly instant - a good six or seven seconds in tedious
reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions
about members of their family they didn't even remember they
had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours.
And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If
you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty
or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of
information about you, your body and your life into one all-
purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around
in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest
triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
Douglas Adams
Mostly Harmless
At least I don't have to cut someone's fingers off/eyes out/head off/etc. to get past these types of security measures any more.
Whew! What a relief.
A couple of decades ago Ottawa was the world's coldest capital city (I forget what it is now). The saying goes that come it's impossible to tell people apart, because everyone's wearing parkas. Now there's a challenge for facial recognition!
"He developed an algorithm which allows a fairly high quality image of a person to be regenerated from a face recognition template..."
This kinda reminds me of the part in Space Quest III, where you gain access to the restricted area inside ScumSoft by holding up a xeroxed picture of the CEO's face to the facial recognition scanner.