FC: Biometric technologies and their problems, from German magazine c't

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

I was fortunate to be invited to speak Tuesday in New York City about 
biometrics and privacy. The two-day conference was organized by the U.S. 
Department of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and SEARCH (The 
National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics):
http://www.search.org/conferences/2002_biometrics/announce.asp

When I was preparing my presentation, I came across a May 2002 article from 
the German computer magazine c't that exposed many flaws in off-the-shelf 
biometric technologies. I highly recommend it. A summary from the UK crypto 
mailing list is below.

-Declan

---

From: Markus Kuhn
Date: Wed May 29, 2002  11:16:20 AM US/Pacific
Subject: c't: unsupervised biometric scanners more toys than serious 
security measures

An even more fatal blow to off-the-shelf *unsupervised* biometric
identification products was given recently by three authors in an
article in the well-respected German computer magazine c't:

  Lisa Thalheim, Jan Krissler, Peter-Michael Ziegler: Körperkontrolle --
  Biometrische Zugangssicherungen auf die Probe gestellt.  c't 11/2002,
  Heise Verlag, ISSN 0724-8679, p 114-, 17 May 2002.

An online English translation is now available on

  http://heise.de/ct/english/02/11/114/

The team tested:

  - six products involving capacitive fingerprint scanners
    (Biocentric Solutions, Cherry, Eutron, Siemens and Veridicom)

  - two optical (Cherry, Identix) fingerprint scanners

  - one thermal (IdentAlink FPS100U) fingerprint scanner (Atmel FCD4B14 
sensor)

  - Authenticam by Panasonic

  - an iris scanner that is currently being marketed in the USA
    and is scheduled to enter the European market in the near future

  - FaceVACS- Logon, a technical solution for recognizing faces
    developed by the Dresdner Cognitec AG

The authors "were able, aided by comparatively simple means, to outwit
all the systems tested" and concluded that "the products in the versions
made available to us were more of the nature of toys than of serious
security measures" and that "business should not treat the security
needs of its customers quite so thoughtlessly".

It is worth stressing that none of the deception techniques used are
really applicable in a *supervised* two-factor application, for example
where a border control or social benefits officer watches someone using
the finger or iris scanner in order to confirm the identity information
stored in a presented smartcard. The relevance of these attacks to the
discussion about the use of biometric features in a national identity
infrastructure is unfortunately sometimes misrepresented. I am still
convinced that both iris scanning and finger print recognition in a
*supervised* scan can be made easily several orders of magnitude more
reliable than human photo/face comparisons.

What currently marketed sensors lack is a really robust detection
technique for whether the detected signal comes from live human tissue,
and this still looks very much like an open research problem. Parts of
suitable solutions might be:

 - tests of various involuntary reactions that require significant
   effort to simulate, for example, is the iris pattern deforming
   correctly when the pupils contract because of illumination?

 - test whether the body part is functional, i.e. can the fingerprint
   be detected from a finger that is typing fluently on a keyboard
   or can the pupil inside the contracting iris read text at the same
   time?

 - is it possible to build low-cost spectrographic cameras/scanners that
   can distinguish materials and tissues by using hundreds instead of
   just three (red/green/blue) wavelength bands, etc.

Markus

--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW:




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