Just when you thought biometrics was a way to protect data and cars, some folks have come up with an amazingly analog way of over-coming the problem. Chop someone’s finger, open the door to a car, a house or unlock their laptop. This happened to one poor accountant in Malaysia, who had the indignity of not only losing his brand new mercedes Benz, but also had his finger chopped off, so that the bandits could open the doors of the car, unlock it and drive away while poor Mr. Accountant bled and tried to count his losses. [ Read the story ]
You’d think it’d be easy enough to include a heartbeat sensor in the fingerprint reader, but no.
Well chop-chop, then.
is that the price of being rich?
Lesson — there is no undefeatable security and often the best methods of defeating security are the crudest.
and painful. it hurts as well
It’s true biometrics and for that matter no security is bullet proof. But discounting biometrics because fingers can be cut off is crude and uneducated. Most of the advantages of biometrics have not been highlighted nor the audience educated. As for chopping of fingers…this is a case you have to worry but like the car radio thefts stopped when thiefs found out that radio won’t work once ripped off will help here too….the problem of detecting the liveness of fingers has been in place and will deter the chopping of fingers.
The gang went too far to steal this car, but this story didnt’t surprise, Malysia is not the richest country in the world after all, the Mercedes S-class is worth around $75,000 and it was protected by a fingerprint recognition system.
So now, the only thing we should really call for, that biometric systems should work only if the necessary body part, be it a finger or an eye is attached to a living person. The case demonstrates the need for liveness detection. I think fingerprint sensors are being developed that detects sweat, and iris scanners that can detect changes in the iris according to movement and light.
http://www.thebiometrix.com
http://biometrix.blogspot.com