One more time to repeat and remember.
Fingerprint is at MOST 'username'. Never a 'password'.
Researchers Created Fake 'Master' Fingerprints to Unlock Smartphones
51–60 of 69 posts
Re: Researchers Created Fake 'Master' Fingerprints to Unlock Smartphones
#52Really interesting work. Snippet from the paper's summary for the lazy: > The proposed method [...] is based on training a Generative Adversarial Network on a set of real fingerprint images. Stochastic search [...] is then used to search for latent input variables to the generator network that can maximize the number of impostor matches as assessed by a fingerprint recognizer. So I hadn't heard about "MasterPrints";…
There has been a lot of research on on the "zoo" of biometrics. Doddington's zoo or the biometric menagerie make reasonable search terms.
The idea is that you have a few classes of errors in any calibrated heuristic system, and biometrics fall prey to the same ones. The individuals that trigger these errors were given animal names.
Given a large enough population, most of the population will be "sheep" - the system works as intended for these.
Some individuals will be prone to false positives. They will pass the system even though they should fail. We'll call these wolves.
Others will be prone to false negatives - they will fail even when they should pass. Goats.
Lambs are a group that is easy to mimic - so others will be mistaken for them once they are in the system, so they sort of perpetuate wolves by having a really generic set of distinguishing traits.
I think this zoo was extended for other unique cases and other animals, but I'm having trouble finding links to the most popular research papers in this series.
The research prompting the posted article seems to be about identifying "wolves" - a good demonstration of the validity of Doddington's theories.
* Wolves are technically just good mimickers, I'm simplifying a bit above.
Re: Researchers Created Fake 'Master' Fingerprints to Unlock Smartphones
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably an eigen-face acts as a master-face of sorts?
Why would it? Eigen-faces tend to not even look like faces (which makes sense, given that the goal is to represent a collection of real faces as linear combinations of the orthogonal eigen-faces). One possibility would be to generate random faces as random linear combinations of the eigen-face basis, but this type of attack could be thwarted by rate limiting. A real "master face" would be a face that looks like many…
The images that screw up image recognition systems to get very high confidence of very wrong classifications don't look like the thing they're mistaken for at all. All the GANs I've seen produce what looks like colorful static to a human eye. I'm not sure where you're getting the info that it would look like an average face because I've never seen ML systems defeated with GANs like that.
Re: Researchers Created Fake 'Master' Fingerprints to Unlock Smartphones
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, for fingerprints, have actual similarity studied been performed on a sample size large enough to draw conclusions about the test of the population?
There’s a long history of fingerprint identification in law enforcement. That’s a far bigger sample size than any academic study could hope for. On the other hand, the issue here seems to be less about how unique fingerprints are, and more about how unique the machine’s reading of a fingerprint is. That has more to do with the machine than the biology.
It is all based on the way the machines read our fingerprints. Only a very few specific data points are stored by the machines and not the entire fingerprint itself(guess it is called minutiae). This loss of information increases the probability for false positives.
Re: Researchers Created Fake 'Master' Fingerprints to Unlock Smartphones
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Switching to Face ID was an enormous improvement for me. Like 99% success, with no special effort, vs 50% at best even if I remembered to wipe the touch sensor first.
I'm waiting for Apple to come out with a small version of the X, then I will switch for sure. I am really annoyed about this trend towards huge phones. I definitely regret getting the 8+.
The regular X is the size of the 8 with the screen size (approx) of the 8+.
Re: Researchers Created Fake 'Master' Fingerprints to Unlock Smartphones
#56I'm fine with "casual" security like my fingerprints for my phone and laptop as primary authentication. It annoys me I have to enter a password first from a user experience perspective. There's definitely need for very hardened phones from physical attack (journalists, canaries, whistleblowers, etc). I'm just not that important so I wish I could choose my security level.
It's still very important to know that these owls aren't necessarily what they seem. People will hear the phrase "fingerprint recognition" and think "Oh that's clever because I'm the only one with these fingerprints!" and assume that that makes it secure. But of course the reality is more complicated than that, and personally I prefer a passphrase because I understand much better how that works and what the potential…
>> these owls aren’t necessarily what they seem
Twin Peaks fan?
Re: Researchers Created Fake 'Master' Fingerprints to Unlock Smartphones
#57Really interesting work. Snippet from the paper's summary for the lazy: > The proposed method [...] is based on training a Generative Adversarial Network on a set of real fingerprint images. Stochastic search [...] is then used to search for latent input variables to the generator network that can maximize the number of impostor matches as assessed by a fingerprint recognizer. So I hadn't heard about "MasterPrints";…
There has been a lot of research on on the "zoo" of biometrics. Doddington's zoo or the biometric menagerie make reasonable search terms. The idea is that you have a few classes of errors in any calibrated heuristic system, and biometrics fall prey to the same ones. The individuals that trigger these errors were given animal names. Given a large enough population, most of the population will be "sheep" - the system w…
Do these classifications correlate with any real world observables besides from biometrics?
Re: Researchers Created Fake 'Master' Fingerprints to Unlock Smartphones
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not going to dispute shoulder surfing is a big problem for unlock patterns, but if you do not care about that attack vector patterns are super efficient and freakingly hard to brute-froce. Considering about 400k combinations [1] on a 3x3 board with a 30sec lockdown every 5 tries it will take on average about 14 days to unlock (given that the pattern is random enough). The average 4 digit pin is doable in about 8…
"I'm not going to dispute shoulder surfing is a big problem for unlock patterns..." I always liked the password alternative of showing the user a bunch of pictures or photos in random positions and have them select a number of them in sequence, perhaps showing a whole new set of pictures in between each selection. Humans tend to have much better visual memory than verbal memory, so they're able to remember this kind…
I think that's even easier to shoulder surf.
Android allows pattern unlocks without showing the pattern as you type it, only on error. That's a good trade off.
Re: Researchers Created Fake 'Master' Fingerprints to Unlock Smartphones
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could DNA be non-unique, except for identical twins or clones?
There's a 1 in 2^46 chance that siblings born separately will have mostly identical DNA, minus a few random mutations.
Even born separately from the same parents, or from different parents with the same available genes to generate the same haploids?
Re: Researchers Created Fake 'Master' Fingerprints to Unlock Smartphones
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a 1 in 2^46 chance that siblings born separately will have mostly identical DNA, minus a few random mutations.
Even born separately from the same parents, or from different parents with the same available genes to generate the same haploids?
Yeah, plus some infinitesimal chance your aunt marries your uncle and your cousin comes out just like you, etc.