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France Set to Roll Out Nationwide Facial Recognition ID Program

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Re: France Set to Roll Out Nationwide Facial Recognition ID Program

#31
Why not have banks act as identity providers?

We have this in Poland and it works great - as a contractor I have to send certain tax documents every month and I only ever authenticate via my bank and associated 2FA.

The other method stopped working after I lost the password and discovered that reset didn't actually send an email like it should have.

Re: France Set to Roll Out Nationwide Facial Recognition ID Program

#32
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This system reads the data from your passport (which the government collected when you applied for one and stored there) and store them on your phone. Software then uses facial recognition to check that the person holding the phone matches the picture from your passport. Hardly 1984...

If you build a system you can query for any face and get the identity, it will not take very long for someone asking for it to be used to identify violent criminals. Then terrorists at airport gates. Then demonstrators. etc.

The "system" (an NFC passport) is already used at airport gates, though.

Violent criminals and demonstrators are rarely identified through their passports because these events don't make it easy to check people's passports, but ID documents are sometimes used, the photo is just checked by policemen rather than an app on the user's phone.

Re: France Set to Roll Out Nationwide Facial Recognition ID Program

#33
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This system reads the data from your passport (which the government collected when you applied for one and stored there) and store them on your phone. Software then uses facial recognition to check that the person holding the phone matches the picture from your passport. Hardly 1984...

If you build a system you can query for any face and get the identity, it will not take very long for someone asking for it to be used to identify violent criminals. Then terrorists at airport gates. Then demonstrators. etc.

This app doesn't provide the government any new information (it uses ID the government already issue) nor invent any new technology (face recognition already exists). If French government - or any government for that matter - wished to do what you described then this app wouldn't be the proverbial gateway drug to that point. In fact, the entire point of passports is to identify people at airport gates and other national borders.

Re: France Set to Roll Out Nationwide Facial Recognition ID Program

#34

This is a rather poor and click-baity article. According to the French government's page on this system [1] (in French): The system is an app that generates login details to allow online access to (public?) services. You install the app on your smartphone. It uses NFC (I suppose) to read your picture (also other details?) from your passport's chip, and stores it locally on the phone. It then uses this to perform faci…

I suspect there is a vulnerability in the flow: 1. Attacker reads the photo form the passport 2. Attacker prints out the photo, perhaps with some perspective correction 3. Attacker tricks the phone into recognizing the print as the subject Am I wrong? My knowledge of the flow is entirely based on the comment above.

That's the problem with any biometric data being used for authentication: once an attacker gets a copy, it's game over.

Biometric passports are a means of identification, not authentication, with the biometric data being signed by a trusted third party, but not considered a secret. The only protection they include is a password printed inside the passport to thwart silent NFC data access.

Re: France Set to Roll Out Nationwide Facial Recognition ID Program

#35

This is a rather poor and click-baity article. According to the French government's page on this system [1] (in French): The system is an app that generates login details to allow online access to (public?) services. You install the app on your smartphone. It uses NFC (I suppose) to read your picture (also other details?) from your passport's chip, and stores it locally on the phone. It then uses this to perform faci…

I suspect there is a vulnerability in the flow: 1. Attacker reads the photo form the passport 2. Attacker prints out the photo, perhaps with some perspective correction 3. Attacker tricks the phone into recognizing the print as the subject Am I wrong? My knowledge of the flow is entirely based on the comment above.

Yes this is basically just client side authentication, easily tampered with.

Re: France Set to Roll Out Nationwide Facial Recognition ID Program

#36
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This system reads the data from your passport (which the government collected when you applied for one and stored there) and store them on your phone. Software then uses facial recognition to check that the person holding the phone matches the picture from your passport. Hardly 1984...

If you build a system you can query for any face and get the identity, it will not take very long for someone asking for it to be used to identify violent criminals. Then terrorists at airport gates. Then demonstrators. etc.

> If you build a system you can query for any face and get the identity

True, but you can't. Facebook can't. That's (one of the reasons) they suggest tagging amongst your friends, not amongst all of FB people.

You can identify one person (with a certain degree of certainty) against a certain range of candidates.

Or you can search for one person on a small sample of images (100s or 1000s of images).

So yes you can have a db of "persons of interest" and that will be searchable when someone appears at an airport. But if the number of people in that DB increases you're going to have more false positives and lower confidence.

Re: France Set to Roll Out Nationwide Facial Recognition ID Program

#37
post #31

Why not have banks act as identity providers? We have this in Poland and it works great - as a contractor I have to send certain tax documents every month and I only ever authenticate via my bank and associated 2FA. The other method stopped working after I lost the password and discovered that reset didn't actually send an email like it should have.

Turns out there's no guarantee that any particular private bank has to offer you their service, so there are some people who simply don't have a bank account. If you're gonna do anything to do with official papers, you have to be at 100% (not 99.999...%) coverage. Which IMHO is just one more reason why this kind of thing is dead on arrival, given that it requires a smartphone.

Re: France Set to Roll Out Nationwide Facial Recognition ID Program

#38

>France says the ID system won’t be used to keep tabs on residents. Unlike in China and Singapore, the country won’t be integrating the facial recognition biometric into citizens’ identity databases That's what they all say but once the systems exists the temptation is there to use it and each successive bunch of authoritarians will use it a little bit more. They don't even need to be more than a small minority of go…

Don't see why this is getting downvoted. The list of examples is just too long. Germany recently changed their laws to allow easier access to registered information. It went from "we'll only use it for those pedo-bio-nuclear-terrorism cases that we keep telling you about" to "well but also for organized crime" to now supposedly "well or copyright infringement or petty theft".

Re: France Set to Roll Out Nationwide Facial Recognition ID Program

#39
post #23

These things always start with an innocuous purpose. The French national DNA database initially was a sexual assault database, to be able to identify rapists. Now your DNA is collected even if you are arrested in a demonstration and never charged. It is like laws. When a new law is on the table, the question is never about the reasonable use of that law, it is all about how it can be abused in the worst possible case…

Imagine the mucky world of politics; somebody is advocating or willing to consider almost any crazy idea. So any state of law is usually a balance between forces that want to move regulation in some new direction.

If the pro-liberty forces don't have the numbers to quell that sort of law when it is proposed; the question becomes where is the line that it starts to become an issue? Because the pro-safety, pro-conformance factions will keep pushing as far as they can. If they've got the power to start reducing liberty then they are going to keep at it until there is a well supported line that has been crossed. Not a line that an unusually intelligent, educated and thoughtful person would identify a concern but a line where ordinary people start to vote differently.

It is very hard to justify liberty to a disinterested observer until the authoritarians actually start taking power; and by then it doesn't really help. It becomes too hard to organise.

Re: France Set to Roll Out Nationwide Facial Recognition ID Program

#40
It's not stated clearly in the official publication but it seems that their medium term goal, beyond using this on government websites, is to also allow private companies access to the tool.

It'd be pretty useful as a way to standardize the way various companies do identity verification online.

I'm honestly pleasantly surprised to see such a thing coming directly from our government, as it can be sometimes quite outdated.

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