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UK To Start Biometric Passport Trials
pearljam145 writes that the "UK is planning to test biometric passports that will include face and iris or fingerprint recording and recognition for a 6 month period on 10000 volunteers. Read here for more details. A face recognition chip is going to be the primary biometric and iris or fingerprint scanning will be use as a secondary biometric. However face recognition might not be the perfectly viable solution since it has produced too many false positives in the past. Face recogntion to this date is not robust enough to support real time recognition in a crowd (more failures?). Only with cooperation of the subject does this system produce good results. So will face recognition join fingerprint and iris recognition in a long list of obtrusive recognition techniques?"
...with their attempts to get J2EE certified. SchlumbergerSema, that is. Cool.
The Army reading list
So will face recognition join fingerprint and iris recognition in a long list of obtrusive recognition techniques?
Passports are inherently obtrusive. You walk up to the person in the uniform behind the desk, hand over your passport, and wait for them to decide if it matches you. Matching a face by camera at this point is no more of a bother. (Well, if you don't pass the scan, it is...but that's a different subject.)
Plus, the people manning the desk control the lighting and the positioning of your face. If you don't take off your sunglasses and look straight ahead, you don't pass. This will improve the performance of the software far above the 'scan the crowd' attempts. You'll still have some false positives, of course; but all systems dealing with humans do.
Becuase you can change your password a whole lot easier than you can change your DNA.
That's nice, but it has nothing to do with what they're doing.
Passwords are authentication. Passports are identification. Identification and authentication are not the same. This use of biometrics would be more analagous to the username than the password.
Keep in mind, also, that this is being used with passports. Passports, unlike ATM cards, are usually presented manually for verification. When the security guard wipes your fingers with an alcohol wipe and mashes them against the machine, spoofing the machinery (e.g., jelly fingers) is a bit harder.
This might even fix the achilles heel of identification (licenses, passports, etc) which is that it is too easy to forge or bribe your way to a fake one. If the big ol' biometric databases notes that Mr. Hakim Faisal is registering for a second passport as Mr. Jorge Fuentes, then that should throw up a flag.
"The only case this will affect positively is that of someone who already has a criminal record which includes biometric data, has the resources to acquire a fake passport, but does not have the resources to fool a biometric sensor."
Not even. I don't know about other countries, but I know my US passport is good for ten years. So even if the US required biometrics tomorrow, we'd still have to wait until the end of 2013 for the change to have any real effect.
What would be more productive (and probably cheaper) than requiring biometrics would be better ways of verifying the passport itself. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing is doing all sorts of things to make US paper currency more secure, but even paper currency from the 1980s is more difficult for counterfeiters to reproduce than your typical passport. Heck, driver's licenses and state ID cards are harder to forge. And let's not forget birth certificates while we're at it.
The only thing requiring biometric information on passports accomplishes is it allows the US government to collect and store the biometric information, from citizens as well as foreign nationals.