Biometric ID Cards Ready For Trial In UK

0ctal writes "Looks like us lucky Brits are getting ID cards no matter what... A 10,000 user trial starts next week. There's been a fair amount of debate on this recently, and it's been coming for some time, but live trials are sooner than expected. The trial is set up to evaluate three competing biometric products. Qinetiq, quoted by the story, are a government backed company set up to use MoD tech in civilian apps."

Comments

Join the campaign

[Albanach]

stand.org.uk has a wealth of information on the plans. It's kept up to date and lets you know what you can do to help the campaign against these cards.

Visit the site, write a letter then Fax your MP.

Qinetiq!

[Anonymous Coward]

Qinetiq Would that be the same incompetent lot that "lost" a barge full of landmines in the English channel? Not sure I would turst them with this kind of project.

As for people being in favour of this scheme. There was a big online have your say for this last year. Several thousand people objected, they some how lost all of these negative votes and decided to count them as 1. That way they still had a majority in favour vote from the Chancellors freinds (me cynical?)

Re:Parliament

[MisterLawyer]

>The Home Office hopes the scheme will be compulsory by 2014.

It hasn't had to pass through parliament because so far it isn't compulsory.

Furthermore, it would probably pass without too much problem because there is generally good public support.

>News of the pilot follows an opinion poll suggesting 80% of people backed a national ID card scheme.

Re:ID Card "trial"?

[dj245]

This sounds just as stupid as a "10,000 driver trial" of right-side driving in Japan.

If by "stupid" you mean deploying a system meant to be universal to a small handful of people, then you are right. Which is why trials like these are not done in that fashion. They will not pick any old 10,000 people. Typically in situations like this they would find a town with a population of around 10,000 people and give the cards to everyone. Then they could put the card readers everywhere appropriate, and nobody who lived in the town would feel left out.

It wouldn't be a proper test of the cards if they didn't actually scan them once in a while. And they can't put the scanners all over the country for a limited test; so they can't distribute the test cards truly randomly, where any person in the country is likely to get one. So they will probably pick one 10,000 person town. Or, better yet, three 3,333 people towns; one for each company.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Are you realistically worried that our (free world) goverments are gonna show their true face and prune out all those with less than blue eyes? "

Aschroft recently sought information on doctors who perform abortions using his new found anti-terrorist powers.

He also sought information on Anti-war protesters again using his new terrorist powers.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17909

Thats just two incidents we know about because they were leaked. Now (under Patriot 2) its a crime to leak what he's using his terrorist subpoenas for.

A republican senator is equating voting for Kerry with being anti-American.

The problem as ever is not: "If you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear." but rather "if your government never does anything wrong you have nothing to fear".

Re:A good Q&A on this from the BBC too...

[persaud]

Multi-culturalism is itself a cultural attribute. Not easy to engineer, but not impossible either. Canada earned its multi-cultural credentials with Quebec, leaving an uneasy union of British and French. The recognition of two national languages went a long way to head off the tyranny of either.

Toronto is now home to dozens of languages (plus English & French) and, except around World Cup time, is quite sane. The cultures are melting, but they are melting at the edges, instead of being shredded and spun vigorously.

If you think this is Funny

[Pan T. Hose]

"Good morning Doctor, this evil genius Tsutomu Matsumoto has compromised the great security of my biometric ID card again... I really think that this so called 'gelatin' circumvention substance should be outlawed! Anyway, could you please transplant me a new set of fingers?"

If you think this is Funny, then you should read Fun with Fingerprint Readers from May 2002 issue of Crypto-Gram Newsletter by Bruce Schneier:

Tsutomu Matsumoto, a Japanese cryptographer, recently decided to look at biometric fingerprint devices. These are security systems that attempt to identify people based on their fingerprint. For years the companies selling these devices have claimed that they are very secure, and that it is almost impossible to fool them into accepting a fake finger as genuine. Matsumoto, along with his students at the Yokohama National University, showed that they can be reliably fooled with a little ingenuity and $10 worth of household supplies.

Matsumoto uses gelatin, the stuff that Gummi Bears are made out of. First he takes a live finger and makes a plastic mold. (He uses a free-molding plastic used to make plastic molds, and is sold at hobby shops.) Then he pours liquid gelatin into the mold and lets it harden. (The gelatin comes in solid sheets, and is used to make jellied meats, soups, and candies, and is sold in grocery stores.) This gelatin fake finger fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time.

His more interesting experiment involves latent fingerprints. He takes a fingerprint left on a piece of glass, enhances it with a cyanoacrylate adhesive, and then photographs it with a digital camera. Using PhotoShop, he improves the contrast and prints the fingerprint onto a transparency sheet. Then, he takes a photo-sensitive printed-circuit board (PCB) and uses the fingerprint transparency to etch the fingerprint into the copper, making it three-dimensional. (You can find photo-sensitive PCBs, along with instructions for use, in most electronics hobby shops.) Finally, he makes a gelatin finger using the print on the PCB. This also fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time.

Gummy fingers can even fool sensors being watched by guards. Simply form the clear gelatin finger over your own. This lets you hide it as you press your own finger onto the sensor. After it lets you in, eat the evidence.

Matsumoto tried these attacks against eleven commercially available fingerprint biometric systems, and was able to reliably fool all of them. The results are enough to scrap the systems completely, and to send the various fingerprint biometric companies packing. Impressive is an understatement.

There's both a specific and a general moral to take away from this result. Matsumoto is not a professional fake-finger scientist; he's a mathematician. He didn't use expensive equipment or a specialized laboratory. He used $10 of ingredients you could buy, and whipped up his gummy fingers in the equivalent of a home kitchen. And he defeated eleven different commercial fingerprint readers, with both optical and capacitive sensors, and some with "live finger detection" features. (Moistening the gummy finger helps defeat sensors that measure moisture or electrical resistance; it takes some practice to get it right.) If he could do this, then any semi-professional can almost certainly do much much more.

More generally, be very careful before believing claims from security companies. All the fingerprint companies have claimed for years that this kind of thing is impossible. When they read Matsumoto's results, they're going to claim that they don't really work, or that they don't apply to them, or that they've fixed the problem. Think twice before believing them.

Interesting, isn't it? See also: T. Matsumoto, H. Matsumoto, K. Yamada, S. Hoshino, "Impact of Artificial Gummy Fingers on Fingerprint Systems," Proceedings of SPIE Vol. #4