Hitachi goes global with vein recognition biometric
Retinal scans, finger prints or facial recognition get most of the attention but developers across the world are quietly labouring away at alternative types of biometrics. Recognition by the way someone walks (their gait) or the rhythm they make when they type and others have each been tried as potential biometrics. Hitachi is …
Impossible to forge? – “they” said that fingerprint scanners are foolproof... all you need is some semitransparent plastic, and you can recreate the results. Not that farfetched. Now, if it would also detect blood flow, that would make just that bit difficult...
P.S. all this new technologies remind me of a certain futurama episode, colonic map biometric scans anyone? ;-)
So now continuing to collect dear departed granny's pension will depend upon scanning her finger while she lives with one of these devices, extracting the scan data, reverse engineering the data and creating an artificial finger simulating all the scanned vein patterns with a slow moving liquid. I can see an interesting criminal spam-driven market developing for artificial fingers once someone figures out how to do this. Bit like the cracked TV decoder cards.
This and other postulated attacks will make interesting projects for security researchers. In practice after a few such cracks are patched this biometric system might prove useful and relatively effective, but other layers of security will probably continue to be needed in all but relatively low risk applications.
"Recognition by the way someone walks (their gait)..."
No doubt a project of the Ministry of Silly Walks.
Sign up, sign up for The Register's weekly IT security newsletter - click here
