Slashdot Mirror
Nose Scanners — the New Face of Biometrics?
An anonymous reader writes "Forget fingerprints and ID cards, this photo story shows how the latest thing in biometrics is nose scanning! Bath university researchers have claimed that the nose will soon be able to be used as a way of identifying a person. Apparently the 'PhotoFace system captures a 3D image of a person's face by taking several photos lit from different angles to throw shadows on the face and then building a model of facial features. The software determined that there are six main nose shapes: Roman, Greek, Nubian, Hawk, Snub and Turn-up.' Some cool pictures make this worth a click — but what happens if a person breaks their nose?!"
Biometrics are going to use your DNA for verification, which is the only fool-proof system. I mean, come on, how would you fake someone else's DNA? ::cough::GATTACA::cough::
Living With a Nerd
Seriously. Wow. What a waste of energy and resources. It's called a nose mold, costs like ten cents. Security theater at it's finest.
This is really a bad idea. The nose is actually one of the few parts of the body that grows (and changes) your entire life. Never mind swelling from colds, etc.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
This is actually a good sign. Linking to single stories is fine, but aggregating stories and providing a complete picture in the summary is better than simply picking the juiciest quotes and pretending like it's any sort of value add.
Lemme get this straight. Bath, a town internationally known for its Rugby Football team, is proposing we use noses for biometric ID?
Rugby being the game for which the phrase "full contact sport" is not so much an understatement as a warning of imminent loss of life? Like American Football only without the pads and helmets? The game where a broken nose is probably the most common injury?
The Bath Rugby team probably have only one intact nose between all 15 players.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Why don't they just scan the whole face?
As if the nose were more unique than the rest of the face plus the nose.
Seriously. No one cares for biometrics. Aside from making for very sick dismemberment jokes in spy movies, biometrics haven't done much to go mainstream.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
It doesn't really matter what the biometric is of, the whole idea has been shown to fail. It turns out that a key feature necessary for authentication is that a credential can be revoked and a new one issued whenever it has been compromised. That is just not practical for biometrics. If it can be measured, someone can capture that measurement and create a fake.
As shown on Mythbusters, the more expensive the fingerprint reader was, the easier it was to fake it out, but all of them failed one way or another.
If we start lining up and shooting marketing departments, we might one day be able to produce a biometric system that would only fall for very difficult surgical duplications (and so raise the bar quite high), but such systems would likely cost several orders of magnitude more than other equally secure methods that we already have available. Meanwhile, in those few cases where the access is important enough to resort to the surgical approach and someone does so, we're right back to the inability to issue a new ID.