Slashdot Mirror
Fingerprint Purchasing Technology Ensures Buyer Has a Pulse
An anonymous reader writes "A small U.S. university has come up with a novel solution to reduce the possibility of using a dead person's hand to get past a fingerprint scanner through the use of hemoglobin detection. The device quickly checks the fingerprint and hemoglobin 'non-intrusively' to verify the identity and whether the individual is alive. This field of research is called Biocryptology and seeks to ensure that biometric security devices can't be easily bypassed."
Checking for oxygenation level might be possible. Does not have to be a very accurate reading.
Does the device only check for pulse or does it also compare to the person's normal blood pressure (which was obtained upon registration into the system) to make sure the person being authenticated isn't being coerced into granting access to unauthorized personnel/burglars, etc???
How will lawyers use it?
Here's a good reason why: What happens when someone manages to steal your password? You change it. What happens when someone managed to recreate your DNA or other biological identifier used for authentication? Good luck getting new DNA or fingerprints.
And it also protects you data during the zombie apocalypse!
Bab72 (Not my real name)
The title is wrong. This is not checking for a pulse. If it were, then people with artificial heart pumps like Dick Cheney wouldn't be able to use it. They are alive, but do not have a pulse.
That said, I could see something like this checking for a pulse. This brings up the interesting problem of how to handle biometric checks for people who don't have those biometrics. Not everyone has fingers. Not everyone has eyes. Not everyone has a pulse. Maybe you don't care about that, as you don't have any of them among your target users, but what happens when that changes? You need a plan to handle that.
I actually read the article; what a useless waste of a web page.
There is only one paragraph that mentions anything about the technology, and that is the paragraph in the summary here.
The rest reads like filler material and pimping the advantages of investing/working in the upper midwest.
Lame. I was hoping for more details.
This kind of stuff is good marketing. Useless, but that hasn't stopped anyone from blowing money so far.
Now convince criminals that your disembodied fingers won't work. There will always be skeptics. Don't worry, your missing fingers won't do the job for them.
Show me a biometric test that can't be spoofed for 10% the cost of the test hardware. Go ahead, I dare ya.
Fake retinas and fake fingerprints took, what, a couple weeks to show up after their respective scanners went into production? Why should any other sort of bio-scanner/detector be any different?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Does this device offer the least bit of protection against the "gummy bear attack" (i.e. a thin molded replica fingerprint, formed from, e.g., etched gelatin, over a living finger)? If not, then it's pretty useless (because lugging around a whole dead body or even severed finger is already riskier/harder than a simple replacement mold).
The article was delightfully free of actual info, but I assume they are just adding this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_oximetry
Whoop-de-doo. There are several outfits that have done something similar over the years, including companies that have tens of thousands of fingerprint devices out on the street already. I would be somewhat surprised if the tech covered in this article is not already patented by Lumidigm or somebody like them.
"Liveness checks" have been a part of fingerprint tech for many years now, ever since the famous "ghosting" attack on the early L-1 and Cross Match sensors. Whoever wrote the article didn't do their homework if they think this is actually "news."