Researchers from Vietnam have cracked facial recognition
scanners on laptops to bypass security.
They
will be demonstrating how to hack facial recognition biometrics
at the Black Hat security
convention in Washington DC this week.
Nguyen Minh Duc, head of the application security department at
the Bach Khoa Internetwork Security Center at Hanoi University of
Technology, will be showing delegates how to beat the facial
recognition systems built into Lenovo, Toshiba and Asus
laptops.
The systems under the microscope use the laptop's built-in
webcam to take a picture of the owner's face, so that it can be
used instead of a fingerprint or password to access the device.
But according to Duc, this system can be beaten in a variety of
ways.
"The mechanisms used by these three vendors haven't met the
security requirements needed by an authentication system. They
cannot wholly protect their users as a result," he explained.
"There is no way to fix this vulnerability. Asus, Lenovo and
Toshiba have to remove this function from all the models of their
laptops and issue a security advisory to users around the
world."
Not only were the researchers able to bypass the security
systems by showing the camera a picture of the registered user,
they were also able to gain entry by showing the camera pictures of
other people's faces, after manipulating light and shade
settings.
At the conference, Duc will be showing how to beat Lenovo's
Veriface III, Asus's SmartLogon V1.0.0005 and Toshiba's Face
Recognition 2.0.2.32 technologies.
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