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Doctors Bypass Biometric Scanners With Fake Fingers
jfruh writes "At a Brazilian hospital, doctors were required to check in with a fingerprint scanner to show that they've showed up for work. Naturally, they developed a system to bypass this requirement, creating fake fingers so that they could cover for one another when they took unauthorized time off. Another good example of how supposedly foolproof security tech can in fact be fooled pretty easily."
All the security experts who think that biometrics are the end-all-be-all of security are mistaken. Biometrics are not secrets, so once one knows your biometric id, they can impersonate you and you can't change your password!
In addition to being a reminder that the people with a hard-on for 'biometrics' are either morons(Here you go, you were born with only ten passwords, so don't lose them!) or primarily interested in surveillance and tracking, or both; this is a useful reminder that 'security' is a system of interlocking parts Not a product you buy from your Solutions Vendor(tm) and set-and-forget.
We have the one doctor, who was caught with the fake fingers, along with at least three others who were ghosting through their shifts. She claims that they leaned on her, threatened her job if she refused to help with the con, they probably claim that she was in on the con and was absent on other days. Regardless of which of those is true, how many other people at the hospital would be in the position to notice whether or not a doctor is present and doing stuff? Probably more than a few. The front-desk servitors had to know what patient flow looked like, restock requests for supplies in various exam rooms can't have looked right, there are a lot more details than the punch-card machine here. This hospital isn't so much suffering from a 'fingerprint scanners are oversold' problem; but a problem with either massive cheating and/or apathy toward cheating, or unaccountable abuse of authority to suppress people who could have blown the whistle.
I think you mean iris scanners. Retina scanners are science fiction.
Why, you mean the doctors can't diagnose retina diseases because you can't see the retina through the pupil?
Ezekiel 23:20
You'd have to be a right fool to be unable to fool these things. As in the link, as here, the application has very little to do with security. It's a people problem, and you can't fix those solely with technology.
Worse, treating it as a technical problem and attacking it with security kit gives a strong signal to your own {doctors,pupils,*} that they're all criminals and need to be treated as such. This in turn creates a powerful incentive to game the system.
What we have here is an incompetent administration trying to fix their mess through shitting on their underlings some more, using technology. Underlings know and dislike this.
And so gaming the system is what they'll do. This quite apart from biometrics being inappropriate everywhere but in criminal forensics. Be careful what you ask for and all that.
This happened almost 7 years ago
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
It surprises me that many debate the “security” of the fingerprint scanners while omitting the major flaw of any biometric system – it is not revocable. You cannot simply reset someone’s fingertips if the system for that instance has been compromised. With pretty much all other authentication there’s some mechanism to delete the bad entry: a password can be reset, a certificate can be revoked, a compromised key can end up in the black list, etc. None of this is possible with any biometric system. Even if it takes an elaborate trickery and a lot of resources to duplicate a finger, a hand, or a mockup of the retina scan, once it’s done, it cannot be “cancelled” at the biometric system level.
There's no such thing as "illegal download"
Probably would have held out longer.
A fingerprint scanner with a pulse detector (which many have) would have been fine too. Any security system can be bypassed with enough effort, so you need to consider what you are trying to protect, and make sure bypassing security is more trouble than it is worth. A doctor who wants an extra day off will obviously make a fake finger, but may not go to the trouble of making a pulse generator.
Let's face it, nothing will ever be secure as long as people are involved.
Time to start getting rid of them. ;)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...they gave the government the finger...
Pulse detector can be fooled too. Check the end of this presentation, where he tried different molds and techniques, and finally succeeds opening a safe that detects pulse using a fake fingerprint: DEFCON 19: Safe to Armed in Seconds: A Study of Epic Fails of Popular Gun Safes.
Here we use fake doctors...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Iris scanners have lower false positive rejection rates and are more accurate than Retina scanners, which do exist. Retinas can become damaged and change with time, unlike the human iris which does not under normal circumstances change during lifetimes.
Iris scanners considered the best biometric authentication, they are also typically the most expensive (look up the LG scanner pricing).
http://www.lgiris.com/ps/products/previousmodels/irisaccess2200.htm
http://web2.utc.edu/~Li-Yang/cpsc4600/6-Iris-DNA/IRIS-Retina.ppt has some good info on the differences.
Iris scanners have lower false positive rejection rates and are more accurate than Retina scanners, which do exist. Retinas can become damaged and change with time, unlike the human iris which does not under normal circumstances change during lifetimes.
Isn't one of the possible side effects of Latisse and LiLash changes in iris color? Some glaucoma meds can do this too. Do iris scanners look at color and pattern? Or just the patterns?
The fact that the doctors were trusted as both the authenticating-client and the key-holder was the issue here. Not biometric authentication. There was no promise that the doctors were not the malicious users themselves, but rather the authenticating-client here had an inherent incentive (getting paid without working) to help defeat the system. So, for all the criticism of biometric systems here -- we're missing the point, the implementation was incorrect to start. Attacking the medium is misguided, and also composed of (mostly) stupid arguments.
If this was a story of doctors having others falsify their time-cards or sharing keys it wouldn't have the same "people who like x auth method are idiots", but since it involves some slightly higher tech punch-in... well, here we are.
There's no such thing as a secure system. Just an inconvenient-to-defeat system; the weakest link/low-hanging fruit and all that. Biometric merely provides another authentication factor that can be used - so pointing to cases where people helped defeat their own locks is akin to saying that your buddy let me make copies of his keys, just look insecure keys are! It's silly. Correct implementation is key before you judge a system.
NO!
Biometrics aren't a replacement for passwords, they're a replacement for USERNAMES. They provide a "something you have" factor to authentication, there still needs to be a "something you know."
Like usernames they aren't secret. They don't need to be secret, and they can be copied without ruining the security of the system. They don't need to be changed, and are unique to each user. Biometrics are great when used as usernames, and a security nightmare waiting to happen when used as a password.
Not a sentence!
Buried in the article
"Most current fingerprint scanners have technology that can detect whether the finger has a pulse, and some read fingerprints at a depth below skin level, which would render the silicon fingers useless. Apparently, that hospital is using an older type of scanner."
Old, crappy technology fooled. Whoopie.
And it appears that this was an organized criminal enterprise:
"The mayor of Ferraz de Vasconcelos, Acir Fillo, said there might be as many as 300 hospital employees who do not exist, except for fake fingers with their prints, but who get paid anyway."
And what grownup thinks any security technology is "foolproof", let alone "motivated criminal enterprise proof"? The technology isn't perfect, therefore it's crap?
And by the way - "silicon" fingers? Bet you a dollar that should have been "silicone".
If this guy is actually paid to write this crap, he needs to be fired.
When I first saw the headlines for this story I immediately went to a much darker place. I envisioned doctors going into the morgue and borrowing a few digits for use in fooling the machines. I mean, it's not like those guys needed them any more. Things like this have happened before.
Then I realized this wouldn't work. For one thing, they'd have the wrong prints. For another, they'd be, well, a bit chilly.
Most current fingerprint scanners have technology that can detect whether the finger has a pulse, and some read fingerprints at a depth below skin level, which would render the silicon fingers useless. Apparently, that hospital is using an older type of scanner.
Giving biometric scanners the (fake) finger
Inside job.
The perfect example of corruption and conspiracy that begins --- and must begin --- at the top.
Another television network said it was the head of the emergency room that ran the scam and that his daughter had not worked a day in three years but got paid all the time.
Fake fingers to fool the boss at Brazil hospital
Ferreira confessed to using different fake fingers bearing the prints of 11 fellow doctors and 20 nurses in order to pretend they were showing up to work five overnight shifts each month, instead of just one, police said.
Ferreira also said the staff at the Ferraz Vasconcelos Hospital paid $2,400 per month to participate.
The doctor will face charges of falsifying a public document and could get two to six years in prison.
Brazilian doctor caught using fake fingers in biometrics scam
Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battlestation!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
The image on modern versions of cell phones is reportedly good enough to fool almost all such scanners.
Sad, really.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Hand key scanners are hideous. Anyone who has ever worked installing, configuring, servicing or maintaining them will tell you how much the hate the damn things. The false negative rate is terrible, they can be thrown off by hands swelling or shrinking because of temperature, exercise, menstrual water weight-gain, diets, or more. They get out of calibration if you breathe in their general direction. In case you haven't got it yet, I absolutely loathe them.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin