Entries Tagged "biometrics"

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Facial Scanning by Burger King in Brazil

In 2000, I wrote: “If McDonald’s offered three free Big Macs for a DNA sample, there would be lines around the block.”

Burger King in Brazil is almost there, offering discounts in exchange for a facial scan. From a marketing video:

“At the end of the year, it’s Friday every day, and the hangover kicks in,” a vaguely robotic voice says as images of cheeseburgers glitch in and out over fake computer code. “BK presents Hangover Whopper, a technology that scans your hangover level and offers a discount on the ideal combo to help combat it.” The stunt runs until January 2nd.

Posted on January 10, 2024 at 7:05 AM • View Comments

PIN-Stealing Android Malware

This is an old piece of malware—the Chameleon Android banking Trojan—that now disables biometric authentication in order to steal the PIN:

The second notable new feature is the ability to interrupt biometric operations on the device, like fingerprint and face unlock, by using the Accessibility service to force a fallback to PIN or password authentication.

The malware captures any PINs and passwords the victim enters to unlock their device and can later use them to unlock the device at will to perform malicious activities hidden from view.

Posted on January 9, 2024 at 7:03 AM • View Comments

Breaking Laptop Fingerprint Sensors

They’re not that good:

Security researchers Jesse D’Aguanno and Timo Teräs write that, with varying degrees of reverse-engineering and using some external hardware, they were able to fool the Goodix fingerprint sensor in a Dell Inspiron 15, the Synaptic sensor in a Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and the ELAN sensor in one of Microsoft’s own Surface Pro Type Covers. These are just three laptop models from the wide universe of PCs, but one of these three companies usually does make the fingerprint sensor in every laptop we’ve reviewed in the last few years. It’s likely that most Windows PCs with fingerprint readers will be vulnerable to similar exploits.

Details.

Posted on November 29, 2023 at 7:09 AM • View Comments

On Technologies for Automatic Facial Recognition

Interesting article on technologies that will automatically identify people:

With technology like that on Mr. Leyvand’s head, Facebook could prevent users from ever forgetting a colleague’s name, give a reminder at a cocktail party that an acquaintance had kids to ask about or help find someone at a crowded conference. However, six years later, the company now known as Meta has not released a version of that product and Mr. Leyvand has departed for Apple to work on its Vision Pro augmented reality glasses.

The technology is here. Maybe the implementation is still dorky, but that will change. The social implications will be enormous.

Posted on September 15, 2023 at 7:15 AM • View Comments

Identity Theft from 1965 Uncovered through Face Recognition

Interesting story:

Napoleon Gonzalez, of Etna, assumed the identity of his brother in 1965, a quarter century after his sibling’s death as an infant, and used the stolen identity to obtain Social Security benefits under both identities, multiple passports and state identification cards, law enforcement officials said.

[…]

A new investigation was launched in 2020 after facial identification software indicated Gonzalez’s face was on two state identification cards.

The facial recognition technology is used by the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles to ensure no one obtains multiple credentials or credentials under someone else’s name, said Emily Cook, spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office.

Posted on August 29, 2023 at 7:03 AM • View Comments

Credible Handwriting Machine

In case you don’t have enough to worry about, someone has built a credible handwriting machine:

This is still a work in progress, but the project seeks to solve one of the biggest problems with other homework machines, such as this one that I covered a few months ago after it blew up on social media. The problem with most homework machines is that they’re too perfect. Not only is their content output too well-written for most students, but they also have perfect grammar and punctuation ­ something even we professional writers fail to consistently achieve. Most importantly, the machine’s “handwriting” is too consistent. Humans always include small variations in their writing, no matter how honed their penmanship.

Devadath is on a quest to fix the issue with perfect penmanship by making his machine mimic human handwriting. Even better, it will reflect the handwriting of its specific user so that AI-written submissions match those written by the student themselves.

Like other machines, this starts with asking ChatGPT to write an essay based on the assignment prompt. That generates a chunk of text, which would normally be stylized with a script-style font and then output as g-code for a pen plotter. But instead, Devadeth created custom software that records examples of the user’s own handwriting. The software then uses that as a font, with small random variations, to create a document image that looks like it was actually handwritten.

Watch the video.

My guess is that this is another detection/detection avoidance arms race.

Posted on May 23, 2023 at 7:15 AM • View Comments

The European Parliament Voted to Ban Remote Biometric Surveillance

It’s not actually banned in the EU yet—the legislative process is much more complicated than that—but it’s a step: a total ban on biometric mass surveillance.

To respect “privacy and human dignity,” MEPs said that EU lawmakers should pass a permanent ban on the automated recognition of individuals in public spaces, saying citizens should only be monitored when suspected of a crime.

The parliament has also called for a ban on the use of private facial recognition databases—such as the controversial AI system created by U.S. startup Clearview (also already in use by some police forces in Europe)—and said predictive policing based on behavioural data should also be outlawed.

MEPs also want to ban social scoring systems which seek to rate the trustworthiness of citizens based on their behaviour or personality.

Posted on October 11, 2021 at 7:49 AM • View Comments

TikTok Can Now Collect Biometric Data

This is probably worth paying attention to:

A change to TikTok’s U.S. privacy policy on Wednesday introduced a new section that says the social video app “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information” from its users’ content. This includes things like “faceprints and voiceprints,” the policy explained. Reached for comment, TikTok could not confirm what product developments necessitated the addition of biometric data to its list of disclosures about the information it automatically collects from users, but said it would ask for consent in the case such data collection practices began.

Posted on June 14, 2021 at 10:11 AM • View Comments

Detecting Deep Fakes with a Heartbeat

Researchers can detect deep fakes because they don’t convincingly mimic human blood circulation in the face:

In particular, video of a person’s face contains subtle shifts in color that result from pulses in blood circulation. You might imagine that these changes would be too minute to detect merely from a video, but viewing videos that have been enhanced to exaggerate these color shifts will quickly disabuse you of that notion. This phenomenon forms the basis of a technique called photoplethysmography, or PPG for short, which can be used, for example, to monitor newborns without having to attach anything to a their very sensitive skin.

Deep fakes don’t lack such circulation-induced shifts in color, but they don’t recreate them with high fidelity. The researchers at SUNY and Intel found that “biological signals are not coherently preserved in different synthetic facial parts” and that “synthetic content does not contain frames with stable PPG.” Translation: Deep fakes can’t convincingly mimic how your pulse shows up in your face.

The inconsistencies in PPG signals found in deep fakes provided these researchers with the basis for a deep-learning system of their own, dubbed FakeCatcher, which can categorize videos of a person’s face as either real or fake with greater than 90 percent accuracy. And these same three researchers followed this study with another demonstrating that this approach can be applied not only to revealing that a video is fake, but also to show what software was used to create it.

Of course, this is an arms race. I expect deep fake programs to become good enough to fool FakeCatcher in a few months.

Posted on October 1, 2020 at 6:19 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.