It’s not difficult to capture a fingerprint, good prints can even be captured with a camera. If someone has your fingerprint, can they gain unlock your phone, laptop computer, or the apps you’ve locked with your print?
They could guess which finger you use for authentication, and then make an exacting, expensive mold of your fingerprint to be of high enough quality. They would need to steal or have access to your device. And then they would have to deal with the advanced encryption methods used in modern mobile devices.
When you set up your account, a unique algorithm creates a template of your fingerprint. Your print is tested against your locally stored fingerprint template to unlock your device. With this security in place, the difficulty of using a fingerprint copy to unlock your devices and apps is very high. But there is still another level of security.
The next layer of biometric security is liveness detection. An advanced hardware solution recently on the marketplace is the Apple iPhone 8 with 3-D facial recognition for authentication. It’s expected to be 10 years, though, before this type of liveness hardware detection trickles down to lower end devices for the majority of smartphone owners. Right now, only about half of smartphones and devices even have fingerprint detection.
To bridge the gap, solutions are being sought using Artificial Intelligence software. AI is currently being used in self-driving cars and voice assistants. A type of AI, machine learning, is already heavily used in biometric security, helping to prevent bank and commercial fraud.
The next goal is using AI software in liveness detection; AI algorithms looking for uniqueness such as skin texture, three-dimensionality, the way a person moves the device, even a reflection in the eye. Involving an AI software-based solution would be more universal; it could be adapted to work on billions of smartphones already in use. And could be put in place much sooner than a hardware-based solution.
Biometric Mythbusters: Do Stolen Fingerprints Mean Identity Theft?
By Contributors for TechFinancials, Feb.6, 2018
Is AI the Missing Link in Biometric Security?
By Kevin Alan Tussy, Aug. 14, 2017, a Techonomy Exclusive
Accurate Biometrics
Practical solutions for fingerprint collection and processing.
No comments:
Post a Comment