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."

Comments

RTFA yourself

[MarcoAtWork]

You don't understand what the article is talking about. When you enroll in a biometric system, the system itself -doesn't- match based on your picture, but on a 'template' which is created by taking your standard data and performing certain destructive operations to arrive to a much smaller 'template' which can still be used to identify you.

This is very similar to the one-way hashing that happens with unix passwords, only that in this case the hashing is 'lossier' so you have 'confidence scores' instead of a black/white answer.

The article shows that given this 'hashed' value you can recreate an image that has a good chance of not only being authenticated by the same system/algorithm (which already should be very hard, given the one-way nature of the templatization) =BUT= also by different systems!

It also is really interesting how if you have access to the 'confidence score' outputted by the recognizer, you can take arbitrary images and blending/averaging them again come up with an image that works.

This is definitely not useless news and will have quite some implications.