Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: paul.fr on 27/04/2007 10:49:05
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could a biometric test on my eyes be fooled if i were to wear contact lenses, coloured or plain. Or i if developed cattaracts or ant other eye infection/disease?
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The biometric tests either look at patterns in your iris or retina. The contact lens, as long as it was transparent would just alter the focussing required to see the iris, not the patterns within it so probably not. If you drew someone else's iris patterns on your contact lens I am not so sure.
A cataract would however get in the way of seeing the biometric data, so would certainly stop the system working.
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If by fooled you mean unable to take an accurate reading - then the answer is yes.
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The biometric tests either look at patterns in your iris or retina. The contact lens, as long as it was transparent would just alter the focussing required to see the iris, not the patterns within it so probably not. If you drew someone else's iris patterns on your contact lens I am not so sure.
From what I had heard about the tests undertaken so far, this is correct with clear contact lenses, but was more problematic with coloured ones. I don't know if the tests related to retinal or iris measurements, although most of what I have heard about seems more commonly to refer to the retinal metrics - I don't know why this is regarded as the preferred metric.
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If by fooled you mean unable to take an accurate reading - then the answer is yes.
thats the one, thanks George.
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There are always people for whom biometric ID won't work. They are referred to as 'Mules' - New Scientist article some while ago.
If your work is so tough that it smooths out your fingerprints, if you have no eyes or you are an amputee your biometric data may not be usable.
But, for most people, it could be useful.
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There are always people for whom biometric ID won't work. They are referred to as 'Mules' - New Scientist article some while ago.
If your work is so tough that it smooths out your fingerprints, if you have no eyes or you are an amputee your biometric data may not be usable.
But, for most people, it could be useful.
The trouble is that 'most people' is fine, if that is not what becomes the definitive identifier for a person. The problem is if biometrics are used for access control, that means that 'mules' are denied access, which means they may be denied the benefits (e.g. employment, easy access to their money) for which that access is an integral part.
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If someone has enough money and important enough reason to find a way (espionage etc) i doubt there would any biometric system which couldn't be fooled. Just as its possible to scan an eye close up it would also be possible to scan one from a distance 5 OR 6 FOOT and then make a contact lens with the features. Once upon a time finger print scanning was the be all but now ways have been found to fool them.
Give it time and they will have to move on to another form of biometrics to keep pace with technology available to those wishing to get past such systems.
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My socialite friend has a biometric in her eyes. In our school party, she uses contact lenses but nothings happened in her biometric. But now, she has an eye problem. My guess is because of having a biometric in her eyes and she still uses contact lenses.
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There have been a couple of cases where people have claimed misuse of Aadhaar biometric authentication. One of my friend who hasn't used their Aadhaar card for a while and has received an SMS from UIDAI stating that their data has been accessed via biometric authentication. This is obviously quite alarming, Government has to take serious actions on this.
[WHOOPS - accidentally inserted some SPAMMY LINKS there; thankfully the moderator was on hand to get rid of them for me...]
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Not only can you use a fake iris, but you can engineer a fake iris from the data stored in an iris recognition system:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/07/fake_irises_foo.html