Page 80 - Security Today, March 2019

The Flaws and Dangers of Facial Recognition
The best way to prevent your facial identity from being stolen is to limit it to airport and border security use cases
BWy Martin Zizi
hen dealing with airport and border security, we need databases, we need to share information and we need law enforcement. However, for day-to-day authentication use cases like IoT, we should resort
pixels at the corner of a person’s eye or mouth would be unrecogniz- able to the facial recognition technology. Apple has set the highest standard for facial recognition with Face ID, developing a second camera called the “True Depth Camera,” which maps your face and takes special 3D pictures that are used to authenticate you with an infrared camera, flood illuminator and dot projector. However, not every device can withstand extensive tests. Dutch organization Con- sumentenbond found that 42 out of 110 devices tested were unlocked by using a picture of the device’s owner. Lenovo/Motorola, LG, Nokia, Samsung, and BlackBerry were all compromised.
Not only has facial recognition been spoofed and hacked, but the use of databases has added vulnerabilities, including widespread breaches. In 2018, there were many soon-to-be historic data breach- es—how can we trust our facial identity is protected in this climate? Another important question: what’s stopping big companies from selling this information to the highest bidder? Nothing. In fact, Ama- zon offers Face Rekognition, which allows clients to build their own facial recognition system. According to Amazon’s blog post, Wash- ington’s sheriff office has been using Amazon Rekognition since 2016 to “reduce the identification time of reported suspects from two to three days down to minutes and had apprehended their first suspect within a week by using their new system.”
to physiologic biometrics that rely on unique live signals. Such live signals allow for effective authentication while at the same time pro- tecting privacy and democracy.
Problem: Facial Recognition Can be Spoofed and Hacked
By 2020 it is expected that more than one billion smartphones will feature facial recognition solutions (Counterpoint Research). In 2017, when Apple announced Face ID would be one of the newest features incorporated into the iPhone X model, it was not long before mobile phone companies followed suit. Users merely look at their smartphone screen and it unlocks, creating the most contactless mo- bile authentication to date. It quickly surpassed the coveted finger- print authentication. However, it did not come without flaws.
Quickly becoming ubiquitous, study after study exposed vulner- abilities in facial recognition. Researchers from the University of To- ronto were able to use adversarial learning to beat a neural net using another neural net. According to the study, by adjusting only a few
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0319 | SECURITY TODAY
FACIAL RECOGNITION
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