Fingerprint Scanners Fooled By Play-Doh

* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us YubaNet is reporting that in recent tests by Stephanie C Schuckers, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Clarkston University, she has shown that, among other things, biometric security measures were fooled 90% of the time by simple attacks like Play-Doh molds. From the article: "Schuckers' biometric research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Office of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. She is currently assessing spoofing vulnerability in fingerprint scanners and designing methods to correct for these as part of a $3.1 million interdisciplinary research project funded through the NSF."

Comments

Re:Is i just me

[Zantetsuken]

Why not add a little hardware and check for a living finger? When I was in the hospital, they put a noninvasive sensor on my finger that measured my pulse and blood oxygen level. It uses two frequencies of light to measure oxygenated haemoglobin.

If your gonna do something like that, why not use something like the hospital finger clamps, making the clamp a open switch, and the finger the closing element, and only activate depending on the electrical resistance of the finger (so it doesnt go off from a peice of metal or whatever, say.) then have the clamp hooked to a circuit or program to calculate if their heartrate is "abnormally high" (so in case you get a gun stuck to your head, it doesnt do your attacker any good) and then put your finger print scanner inside the clamp... though all this does is take care of a finger print scanner in a really complex way...

Better yet, and easier, just use retinal scanners, or thermal imaging of their face to check the location of the veins in their head (fars I've hear, everybodys forehead veins are different, security firms were looking into using that)

Still easiest of all, go talk to the Israelies, they're supposed to be the masters of security (camera/automatic face recognition and that sort of thing anyway)....

Re:Boycott

[TheRaven64]

Almost all of **BB's submissions have been accepted by SkuttleMonkey, so I suggest that the appropriate action is to block stories from this 'editor'. I have now done so, and if enough other people do then it will start to hurt /.'s revenue (if no one sees his articles, no one will read them. If no one reads them, then no one will see the adverts, or use up any of their subscription money on them) and hopefully this will encourage them to employ some more competent people.