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

One thing that is missing from "the spoof"

[adzoox]

A local company to me, has a biometric scan + retina and thumbprint scan, but it also takes your body temp average/signature .... the combination of the three are pretty hard, if not impossible, to spoof. And, anyone that can, was going to break into your system anyway. (With the VERY expensive equipment and extensive knowledge it would take to reproduce all three)

Sometimes we give criminals to much credit. Again, if it's someone that can go through all three of those, they were going to get past the toughest of Indiana Jones hurdles.