Re: To see why iris scanning can be a biometric ...

[Michael Simpson <mikie.simpson () gmail com>]

On 22 August 2010 05:19, Dan Kaminsky <dan () doxpara com> wrote:
> So there were actually a couple of *really* cool papers at SIGGRAPH this
> year:  Normally, computers graphics is all about, given a material,
> determine the way light interacts with it.  Lately, the field has been
> moving the other direction -- given an understanding of the way light
> interacts with a material, synthesize something with those properties:
>
> Physical Reproduction of Materials with Specified Subsurface Scattering
> http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/pubs/Hasan_2010_PRO/index.php
>
> Fabricating Spatially-Varying Subsurface Scattering
> http://www.dongallen.com/project/fabscat/fabscat.htm  (heh.)
>
> The general problem with biometrics is that they leak.  We've already seen
> spoofing hit fingerprint scanners -- with gummi bears, no less.  It's pretty
> clear that 3D printers are effectively becoming material replication
> engines.  Ginning up a sufficienct ocular biometric is going to be an
> affordable proposition in an uncomfortably small period of time.
>
> We have much lower standards for biometrics than crypto ciphers.  People
> _really_ want to be able to self-authenticate.
>
> That being said, security might be quantized, but it's not absolute.  Once
> you start throwing in things like threats to family, not even duress phrases
> are a catch all ("anything happens to us, your family is dead in a year").
> And there has never, in the history of man, been a security technology that
> has achieved complete success against repudiation.  Just not how the world
> works.
>
> Last note -- my understanding is that iris entropy is pretty high -- not as
> high as blood vessels on the retina, but higher than fingerprints, and way
> higher than hand geometry.  It also leaks "less", in that fingerprints are
> just deposited everywhere.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-640.html

another high entropy possibility is patterns of blood vessels in palms
- fujitsu has tech based on this

mike

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