I was reading this blog, where they had this post named Switch Fingerprints To Trick Hi-Tech Cops which talked about an incident that actually made me ponder upon how insecure our biometric security techniques can sometime be.
The post gave details of an incident to testify that. A lady named Lin Ring was deported from Japan named Lin Ring was deported from Japan in the year 2007. To be allowed at the airport, Lin Ring very ingeniously got her finger prints hacked – Ring got the left finger print to right, and the right to left. That was smart. However, this din’t help work. Immigration officers suspected the scars on Lin Ring’s fingers and started the investigation. Needless to mention , what happened next.
According to the post Lin had got her surgery done at a private clinic after paying about 9000 pounds ($ 14600). Good money, I would say, but not good enough to escape the scars. Lin Ring had smartly worked her way out, but those marks on the thumb and finger were enough to send out the smell of crime and alert the officers.
The iris recognition (it is a method of biometric recognition which uses an individual’s iris pattern. It makes use of camera technology) system was perhaps an outcome of such incidents. And this system (iris recognition) is not smart hackers to hack}. But then it has other disadvantages to it like, poor picture quality, ineffective from a far distance, and will take good time to get to all security places as the money that goes into setting up the entire system is very high.
Also, commercial iris recognition systems can be tricked easily by giving them an accurate picture of the face and not the real face that needs to be tested.
Having said that, iris recognition if carried out everywhere can really help strengthen security.
Tags: biometric security, fingerprints switch, iris recognition, security