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Vein Patterns Could Replace Fingerprints
Death Metal writes "Companies in Europe have begun to roll out an advanced biometric system from Japan that identifies people from the unique patterns of veins inside their fingers. Finger vein authentication, introduced widely by Japanese banks in the last two years, is claimed to be the fastest and most secure biometric method. Developed by Hitachi, it verifies a person's identity based on the lattice work of minute blood vessels under the skin."
An evaluation by the National Physical Laboratory in the UK found vein patterns to be the least reliable biometric they'd ever encountered, worse even than face recognition which became notorious for its zero-percent hit rate in several public trials (OK, so you can't get worse than zero percent, but in carefully controlled lab trials face recognition did get a non-zero score).
Looks like another great example of biometric vendor marketing at work. "Buy our stuff, it's gooder than anyone else's!".
It's less likely your fingers will get hacked off and taken by criminals trying to get past scanners, if this is used. Although I suspect criminals will find a way to flash-freeze fingers, seal the ends, and then warm up in water before using in the same situations where they could get away with severed fingers for fingerprints (remote access, etc.)
Get off my launchpad!
They recently introduced the palm scan to ID people walking in and out of their tests (GMAT etc). I still haven't figured out why. If nothing else it's an interesting way to get strange diseases from sick people who sneeze politely.
And how would a duress pin help anything?
As if the cops could jump onto the scene during the short time that an ATM transaction takes...
If the bad guys stand next to you, pointing a gun to your head while you make the transaction then the ATM camera will capture that anyways and provide good evidence later on.
But if they don't (which, I guess is more likely) then entering a duress pin changes exactly nothing. Sure, the bank now knows that you may be in trouble - but what can they do, hand out marked money?
I would think that robbers in the business of kidnapping people already have ways to launder marked bills.
Your right, should be a two-step process.
The summary uses two terms, identification & authentication, as if they were interchangeable. They are not.
Identification is the process by which the identity of a user is established, and authentication is the process by which a service confirms the claim of a user to use a specific identity by the use of credentials (usually a password or a certificate).
So the biometrics would identify you, not authentify.
...getting sick of the endless ways to identify and tag individuals that have appeared recently? Fingerprints, iris scans, voice recognition, face regonition, smell (!) , walking gait, now vein patterns. How long before we're all just barcoded with a unique id??
I'm sure some people will say I'm just being paranoid but with the advancement of AI image processing it won't be long before we can be identified no matter where we are , what the time is , or what we're doing. Yes , the governments all roll out the "terrorism" line whenever questioned about this but we've all seen how its been abused already.
So whats next - infra red heat pattern signatures of individuals? Chemical piss analysis in public toilets?
If you scan both hands simultaneously, you can usually tell if the person is right or left-handed. The hand that is used more has a larger blood supply, bigger blood vessels.
It doesn't work on piano players, typists and some others who use both hands vigorously.
No, it's not. You just need to hack off the whole arm and you will have easy access to a few nice, large and accessible veins & arteries. It raises the bar for the criminals, but your potential loss also becomes larger.
...been doing this specifically for security biometrics for years. Perhaps the news would be that it will become more pervasive, but the same problems that prevented it from taking off in the past apply now as well - you have to network the device in order to validate the user's pattern (most of them actually create a sort of hash code actually.)
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Ironically, a near infrared sensor (used for just this purpose - security) that I played with about 2 years ago had firmware which not only detected whether or not the hand (this one examined your palm) was severed but apparently had a method of detecting if the user was under stress (presumably this affects dilation and blood flow or something else observable in the spectrum) in order to prevent hostages from being used like this. Despite all the obvious problems with this, it was an interesting idea; however, apparently some people had problems using it at different times of the year because of this 'feature' or when in agitated or excitable states. Things are never as simple as they appear sadly...
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My mother who is in her 80's had a hassle renewing her driver's license as the fingerprint of her index finger had changed with age (and arthritis probably). If you think of the 5 to 10 year time frames of driver's licenses and other ID's, it is not hard to imagine problems with changes due to aging (not just things like losing a body part in an accident), there is a risk of losing your identity based on biometrics--any biometric. If you make things too easy to update, you increase the risks of identity theft...... (My dad was with my mom at the DMV, he vouched for her and they looked at the old lady, figured she wasn't up to anything, and gave her her new license. Which means some lonely clerk at the DMV could also have issued another driver's license in her name with another photo and fingerprint associated with it: I heard of a location where you can buy an official state driver's license and Social Security card for $300 here in Denver.)
I am under the assumption that it would rather difficult to get close enough (contact) to someone and use a special light and scanner/sensors to obtain vein patterns without a person knowing... except if maybe they were asleep. This isn't a photograph, it is a contact scan that requires multiple infrared light sources.
From a security standpoint, even if you did obtain someone's scan, then how exactly would you impersonate a fake vein pattern in your arm to trick a scanner?
I do want to point out that I would not agree with using fingers, however, since a scanner could also obtain fingerprints, which is NOT AT ALL privacy friendly. A better approach would be to read the veins in the back of the hand.