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Using Face Recognition Instead of a PIN Number
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Aug 02, 2007 03:03 AM
from the please-enter-your-face-again dept.
from the please-enter-your-face-again dept.
coondoggie writes "Face recognition as a unique biometric is growing slowly in certain corporate and consumer applications, but researchers at the University of Houston (UH) are trying to make the technology far more ubiquitous and secure: they want it to replace the dozens of personal identification numbers (PIN), passwords and credit card numbers everyone uses every day.
University researchers developed the URxD face recognition software that uses a three-dimensional snapshot of a person's face to create a unique biometric identifier."
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Bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
This is stupid for a couple of reasons. The first is that biometrics suck and are usually almost trivial to subvert. See the $10 fake finger [deeperwants.com], for an example. What do you do if somebody hacks your credentials as well? Have facial re-constructive surgery? But even if you had very good biometrics that were hard to fake, it still less secure than having separate credentials to access everything.
Why is this? Well for the sake of argument, let's suppose it costs £50 to create a duplicate of my chip and pin card that will work in any cash point. I have four such cards in my wallet so the cost of duplicating them all is £200. In order for the biometric to replace my cards completely and be equally secure, it has to cost more than £200 to fake.
The problem is that the unified security mechanism rarely costs more to subvert then all the IDs it replaced. This doesn't just apply to bank-cards it also applies to national ID cards and any centralisation of security.
The fundamental principle here is that centralising security often reduces security. This is something to keep in mind when you're consolidating servers [slashdot.org].
Simon
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Entering in your PIN number into an ATM machine and getting a NSF funds error message.
Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Be thankful I couldn't locate you with my RADAR ranging device, you might have been zapped with LASER radiation.
Otherwise, well done.
Easy to reproduce and.. (Score:5, Funny)
That's secure right?
Parent
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No. No. and No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay sure, spend $50 on some sensor or $150 on sensor+lock and it will accept a fake finger. But that's not your average biometric installation.
What do you do if somebody hacks your credentials as well?
If the bad guy wants in, he won't try to reproduce your *face* to get in. This is just absurd.
The problem is that the unified security mechanism rarely costs more to subvert then all the IDs it replaced.
Except biometric installation
Re:PIN *NUMBER* ??? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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N-Ten (Score:3, Informative)
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What would you use at an ATM machine other than a PIN number?
Re:PIN *NUMBER* ??? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, you'll be FUBAR beyond all recognition.
Parent
informative or pedantic? YOU decide, summer 2007! (Score:3, Funny)
and for the final coupe de gras
I was just about to mod you +1Funny (I'm sure others will take up the slack) when I noticed the way you spelled that... /. encoding is going to chew up), as in "mercy". What you wrote is "slice of fat" which just sounds like you'd add insult to injury by stabbing them in the blubber.
It's "coup de grâce [wikipedia.org]" (with the little hat over the 'a' that I think the
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that sometimes you don't actually want it to be truly unique per individual. The way things are today, if I'm not feeling well I can send my girlfriend to do some shopping, give her my bank card and tell her my PIN. The most she can rip me off for is £200 minus anything I may have already withdrawn that day, and
Interesting, but Ill decline (Score:3, Insightful)
Essentially, it uses your face to access your information in a database, which could include bank, credit card, medical, or pretty much anything else desired.
However, all a person then needs to commit fraud is to capture these scans and feed it back to the software...
Ill keep my zero liability credit cards and my 4 and 6 digit pin numbers thank you.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you suspect that you can change your pin code. Or change them daily if you want to.
I'm sure a mask could be reverse engineered to any given "face code" that would fool a machine, if not a human.
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It's trivial for my daugthers to choose different PINs.
Please explain how they would go about getting machines using the 3D face-contours to acknowledge that they are not, infact, the same person.
There's 300 million people in the US, of these about 2 million people are identical twins. I'd say a technology which is, from the get go, even absent any weaknesses, unusable for close to 1% of the popu
Check for life! (Score:5, Interesting)
Some poor Malaysian fellow has already lost a finger [bbc.co.uk]. I'd hate to have my head stolen just to access my bank account.
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Now that HAS to be a Micro-soft project...
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Yep. Might just want to limit this system to in-store purchases. Then when a would-be thief walks into a Best Buy to get a plasma TV using my card and severed head, the clerk may get suspicious and ask for a second piece of ID.
Its not the number of passwords that is the issue (Score:5, Interesting)
Recently I needed a new password for a site. I tried the short one. "your password must be at least X characters". fine, whatever, that's why I use my long one,"your password is too long", so a new, made-up one "your password must contain at least one number". WTF?
Can we not at least agree some standard on this? Like many people I end up having to write this new mangled password down, totally defeating its security.
I do not see, from a code POV, why it matters that the password is less than X characters. Between 5 and 10 characters? WHY? what is wrong with between 5 and 50 characters? or 5 and 100 characters?
Most people can remember a sentence pretty easily, especially a favourite catchphrase or movie quote, remembering "tuesdaypass442" is not so easy, and thus they get written down. I understand the need for minimum pass lengths, but capping the max so low, and so close to the min, is just madness. Give us flexibility in passwords, not some dubious new expensive tech to do the same job.
Re:Its not the number of passwords that is the iss (Score:2)
Re:Its not the number of passwords that is the iss (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Its not the number of passwords that is the iss (Score:4, Interesting)
w2trw
w2trwrld
yes, you are right, welcome to the real world is easy to remember. and now it will evoke the memory of w2trwrld, which is between 5-10 letters and contain one digit, and thus will be accepted as strong on 90% of the passworded applications out there.
Parent
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Like to Forget (Score:2)
Sounds pretty fucked up for twins... (Score:4, Interesting)
They are trying to solve a problem (I hate pin codes) by making it to a worse problem. Way to go...
Re:Sounds pretty fucked up for twins... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, even the female ones.
Parent
Sounds great! Until... (Score:2)
Obviously CmdrTaco and Alan Cox wouldn't like it (Score:4, Funny)
"Please stuck your head in the scanner for face recognition."
*grumble*
"Your face was not recognized, please rub your face with the towel provided and try agiain."
*damn*
"We failed to recognized your face after several trials. We'll now shave your face for a better recognition result. To avoid you moving your head while shaving is in progress, we'll lock your head firmly now."
*shaver pop out*
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"
MI (Score:3, Insightful)
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So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Update biometrics. (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess you'd have to have your biometrics updated every few years as you age. More often if you smoke, drink heavily, sun bath, etc... those things age you faster.
It's Bogus (Score:4, Interesting)
How do I know? Because the exact same maths apply to a different domain, and we'd already have seen developments there if this was true.
Decompilation uses exactly the same abstract mathematical concepts as shape recognition (of which facial recognition clearly is a subset). Just replace "vertices" with assembly-language instructions and the "shapes" to which they may belong with program structures (for / while loops, subroutines &c).
If there was anything in this facial recognition malarkey, somebody would have created a working decompiler by now. That's just a simple application of the law of averages; there are many more hackers out there than there are biometrics researchers. And there's a huge application for a decompiler: the ability to decompile a program which originally was written in, say, Visual BASIC into C++ will mean that programmers can collaborate on a project without having to have a language in common (and, incidentally, it will also mean that Freedoms One and Three can be taken by force like Freedoms Zero and Two). So far, nobody has created such a thing.
It's snake oil, pure and simple.
Plus, I kind of like the extra security layer that I get by having different PINs for all my cards and different paswords for all my online accounts. If someone discovers, say, my Halifax PIN, they'll have to steal my Halifax card. But if they catch me on a day when I'm not carrying that one and steal my Lloyds TSB card or my Abbey National card instead, the Halifax PIN is useless to them (and while I'm sorting out blocking the stolen card, I can change the compromised PIN). Likewise, if someone discovers my Yahoo! Messenger password, they can't impersonate me on Slashdot.
ummmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Stupid for several reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
- You have to consciously enter a PIN to give it away - unless you're fooled by a complete rebuild of an ATM, you're not likely to enter this particular number anywhere else; but you show your face to everyone in the street, making it trivial to get several photographs of it and even do a 3D reconstruction if desired.
- You can enter a number at a keypad even if severely impaired and under pretty unfriendly conditions (outside ATM in heavy rain, when you're wearing gloves and are a little under the effect of both a cold and cold medicine, say). It's a pretty fool-proof, accessible way of entering a small amount of data. Facial recognition, on the other hand, requires - unless there have been vast advances - very good lighting, a clear image of the face not obscured by sunglasses, intensive make-up or bruises, and no vast changes in hair style or beard growth.
- Image recognition is cost intensive, energy intensive and computationally expensive; a keypad of the highest level, secure and proof against vandalism will cost what? A couple of hundred bucks at most? To get facial recognition you need light sources that don't interfere with the cameras, the cameras themselves, complex software behind them and - also very important - you need large amounts of data on the facial features. Granted, it might be easy to compress them to a couple of hundred kb's if you're willing to sacrifice some accuracy, but compare that with the four or five byte you need to store a PIN!
- Problem of false negatives and false positives: when I enter a PIN I can usually get it right on the first try; I usually only run into problems when I confuse it with the PIN from another card. Entering it wrongly has happened maybe once or twice in my life, as far as I remember. Now, what are the chances that the facial recognition software will correctly identify me 99.99999% of the time? And how big is the risk that it might mistake another person for me?
- Another thing: right now I can hand my credit card to my brother, tell him to pick me up a little cash from an ATM and give him my PIN and card. Will there be provisions made for you to authorize other people, like your spouse? How many? For how long?
I think it's strange that so many people seem to think just because something is newer it is automatically better than the old technology / method / tool. Don't get me wrong, I love progress - but increasing the failure points of a known and working (if not perfect) system seems like a strange idea to me...Re:Stupid for several reasons (Score:4, Interesting)
Some simple image matching process would be a good idea IMHO. It doesn't have to be fantastic and definitely not a replacement for a PIN.
Parent
3D map of the face ? What about acne ? (Score:2, Funny)
Or better still, a broken nose ? Imagine having to go explain to the bank that you needed to change your pin because you were drunk and got into a fight at a pub ? There goes your chance at getting a homeloan
Face recognition with a photo! (Score:2)
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Should be interesting (Score:2)
Now if you enhance the credit/atm card with a biometric to ensure that the owner of the card is the one using it, that would be
useful for fraud scoring, but not an auth factor (Score:3, Informative)
Where it will be used is in fraud scoring. The Alliance and leicester trialled small webcam like devices on ATMs but for some reason took them out of service. Recognition is useful, but it will not be used to block transactions, it will mostly likely be used to raise a score on a fraud profile for a transaction.
This type of fraud profiling is becoming more important because the UK will be moving to Faster payments [apacs.org.uk] at the end of 2007 - where once banks had 3 days to run scanning products [visionmagazine.net] (for terrorist account activity and fraud) - they will only have a few minutes. The problem at the moment in the UK is that customers do a lot of electronic payments compared to USA - so many transactions will not have time for all the fraud checks.
so if someone who looks nothing like my description makes a transaction, then the score will increase on the account which can then implement further fraud checks in resulting transactions.
when I designed and built a fraud detection system for a UK mobile operator, we found that when a handset/number had fraud committed on it - it usually was usually picked up by lots of the fraud scanners and would stick out like a sore thumb. Each customer would have an associated fraud score and when it reached a certain point, the fraud team would get involved.