Wednesday 18 February 2009

Biometrics: cockwaffle for the managerialists

I don't really believe all this claptrap about biometrics based on my personal experience with voice and facial recognition. One of the key "selling points" of the ID card is that it's going to keep a whole lot of "un-fake-able" biometric information about you.

Well ...

A Vietnamese researcher will demonstrate at Black Hat DC next week how he and his colleagues were able to easily spoof and bypass biometric systems that authenticate users by scanning their faces.

The researchers cracked the biometric authentication embedded in Lenovo, Asus, and Toshiba laptops by spoofing the biometric systems with everything from a photo of the authorized user to brute-force hacking using fake facial images. They successfully bypassed Lenovo's Veriface III, Asus' SmartLogon V1.0.0005, and Toshiba's Face Recognition 2.0.2.32 -- each set to its highest security level -- demonstrating vulnerabilities in the systems that let an attacker cheat them with phony photos of the legitimate user and gain access to the laptops.


Outside of movies, biometrics just do not work reliably. Can the fucking cockmongers in government please stop peddling this shit now?

1 comment:

Trident said...

Biometrics are a joke, they fail to reliably recognise enrolled voice/face/fingerprints - being told by a machine it doesn't believe you are who you say is frustrating enough - all we need is civil servants who believe in this infallible technnology...