Currently, passengers must verify their identity at multiple checkpoints throughout a single journey, leading to delays and increased congestion at airports. To address this challenge, Facephi has developed technology that enables identity validation before arriving at the airport, reducing wait times and ensuring a seamless and secure travel experience. This innovation has already been successfully tested in collaboration with IATA through a proof of concept conducted last November.
The idea of creating an ecosystem in which identity is known throughout the entire passenger journey is not new to Facephi, of course. I remember that Safran developed a similar concept in the 2010s before it sold off Morpho, MorphoTrust, MorphoTrak, and Morpho Detection. And I’ve previously discussed the SITA-IDEMIA-Indico “Digital Travel Ecosystem.”
But however it’s accomplished, seamless travel benefits everyone…except the terrorists.
But I provided external samples of what I do anyway: two client short data sheets, three client long data sheets, three Bredemarket data sheets, two client landing pages, one Bredemarket landing page, and two other samples.
So I will share one of the landing pages with you, but not a client one. This is one of mine, for Bredemarket’s identity/biometric prospects.
This metal injection attack isn’t from an Ozzy Osbourne video, but from a video made by an expert lock picker in 2019 against a biometric gun safe.
The biometric gun safe is supposed to deny access to a person whose fingerprint biometrics aren’t registered (and who doesn’t have the other two access methods). But as Hackaday explains:
“(T)he back of the front panel (which is inside the safe) has a small button. When this button is pressed, the device will be instructed to register a new fingerprint. The security of that system depends on this button being inaccessible while the safe is closed. Unfortunately it’s placed poorly and all it takes is a thin piece of metal slid through the thin opening between the door and the rest of the safe. One press, and the (closed) safe is instructed to register and trust a new fingerprint.”
Biometric protection is of no use if you can bypass the biometrics.
But was the safe (subsequently withdrawn from Amazon) over promising? The Firearm Blog asserts that we shouldn’t have expected much.
“To be fair, cheap safes like this really are to keep kids, visitors, etc from accessing your guns. Any determined person will be able to break into these budget priced sheet metal safes….”
But still the ease at bypassing the biometric protection is deemed “inexcusable.”
So how can you detect this injection attack? One given suggestion: only allow the new biometric registration control to work when the safe is open (meaning that an authorized user has presumably opened the safe). When the safe is closed, insertion of a thin piece of metal shouldn’t allow biometric registration.
For other discussions of injection attack detection, see these posts: one, two.
By the way, this is why I believe passwords will never die. If you want a cheap way to lock something, just use a combination. No need to take DNA samples or anything.
Oh, and a disclosure: I used Google Gemini to research this post. Not that it really helped.
And of course I referenced VeriDas in my February 7 post when it defined the difference between presentation attack detection and injection attack detection.
Biometric Update played up this difference:
To stay ahead of the curve, Spanish biometrics company Veridas has introduced an advanced injection attack detection capability into its system, to combat the growing threat of synthetic identities and deepfakes….
Veridas says that standard fraud detection only focuses on what it sees or hears – for example, face or voice biometrics. So-called Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) looks for fake images, videos and voices. Deepfake detection searches for the telltale artifacts that give away the work of generative AI.
Neither are monitoring where the feed comes from or whether the device is compromised.
I can revisit the arguments about whether you should get PAD and…IAD?…from the same vendor, or whether you should get best in-class solutions to address each issue separately.
« L’internaute doit simplement effectuer 3 mouvements de la main et l’avant-bras devant la caméra de son écran (ordinateur, tablette, smartphone). En quelques secondes, il/elle vérifie son âge sans dévoiler son identité. »
Help me, Google Translate; you’re my only hope.
“The Internet user simply has to make 3 movements of the hand and forearm in front of the camera on their screen (computer, tablet, smartphone). In a few seconds, he/she verifies his/her age without revealing his/her identity.”
The method is derived from a 1994 scientific paper entitled “Rapid aimed limb movements: Age differences and practice effects in component submovements.” The abstract of the paper reads as follows:
“Two experiments are reported in which younger and older adults practiced rapid aimed limb movements toward a visible target region. Ss were instructed to make the movements as rapidly and as accurately as possible. Kinematic details of the movements were examined to assess the differences in component submovements between the 2 groups and to identify changes in the movements due to practice. The results revealed that older Ss produced initial ballistic submovements that had the same duration but traveled less far than those of younger Ss. Additionally, older Ss produced corrective secondary submovements that were longer in both duration and distance than those of the younger subjects. With practice, younger Ss modified their submovements, but older Ss did not modify theirs even after extensive practice on the task. The results show that the mechanisms underlying movements of older adults are qualitatively different from those in younger adults.”
So what does this mean? Needemand has a separate BorderAge website—thankfully in English—that illustrates the first part of the user instructions.
I don’t know what happens after that, but the process definitely has an “active liveness” vibe, except instead of proving you’re real, you’re proving you’re old, or old enough.
Now I’m not sure if the original 1994 study results were ever confirmed across worldwide populations. But it wouldn’t be the first scheme that is unproven. Do we KNOW that fingerprints are unique?
Another question I have regards the granularity of the age estimation solution. Depending upon your use case and jurisdiction, you may have to show that your age is 13, 16, 18, 21, or 25. Not sure if BorderAge gets this granular.
But if you want a way to estimate age and preserve anonymity (the solution blocks faces and has too low of a resolution to capture friction ridges), BorderAge may fit the bill.
When considering falsifying identity verification or authentication, it’s helpful to see how VeriDas defines two different types of falsification:
Presentation Attacks: These involve an attacker presenting falsified evidence directly to the capture device’s camera. Examples include using photocopies, screenshots, or other forms of impersonation to deceive the system.
Injection Attacks: These are more sophisticated, where the attacker introduces false evidence directly into the system without using the camera. This often involves manipulating the data capture or communication channels.
To be honest, most of my personal experience involves presentation attacks, in which the identity verification/authentication system remains secure but the information, um, presented to it is altered in some way. See my posts on Vision Transformer (ViT) Models and NIST IR 8491.
In an injection attack, the identity verification/authentication system itself is compromised. For example, instead of taking its data from the camera, data from some other source is, um, injected so that it look like it came from the camera.
Incidentally, I should tangentially note that injection attacks greatly differ from scraping attacks, in which content from legitimate blogs is stolen and injected into scummy blogs that merely rip off content from their original writers. Speaking for myself, it is clear that this repurpose is not an honorable practice.
Note that injection attacks don’t only affect identity systems, but can affect ANY computer system. SentinelOne digs into the different types of injection attacks, including manipulation of SQL queries, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other types. Here’s an example from the health world that is pertinent to Bredemarket readers:
In May 2024, Advocate Aurora Health, a healthcare system in Wisconsin and Illinois, reported a data breach exposing the personal information of 3 million patients. The breach was attributed to improper use of Meta Pixel on the websites of the provider. After the breach, Advocate Health was faced with hefty fines and legal battles resulting from the exposure of Protected Health Information(PHI).
Deepfakes utilize AI and machine learning to create lifelike videos of real people saying or doing things they never actually did. By injecting such videos into a system’s feed, fraudsters can mimic the appearance of a legitimate user, thus bypassing facial recognition security measures.
Again, this differs from someone with a mask getting in front of the system’s camera. Injections bypass the system’s camera.
Fight back, even when David Horowitz isn’t helping you
Do how do you detect that you aren’t getting data from the camera or capture device that is supposed to be providing it? Many vendors offer tactics to attack the attackers; here’s what ID R&D (part of Mitek Systems) proposes.
These steps include creating a comprehensive attack tree, implementing detectors that cover all the attack vectors, evaluating potential security loopholes, and setting up a continuous improvement process for the attack tree and associated mitigation measures.
As you can see, the tactics to fight injection attacks are far removed from the more forensic “liveness” procedures such as detecting whether a presented finger is from a living breathing human.
Presentation attack detection can only go so far.
Injection attack detection is also necessary.
So if you’re a company guarding against spoofing, you need someone who can create content, proposals, and analysis that can address both biometric and non-biometric factors.
There’s a critical difference between biometrics for identification and biometrics for health. Well, MOST biometrics for identification; what I’m about to say doesn’t apply to DNA.
When you capture biometrics from people, you don’t really care about cleanliness. If the person’s fingernails are dirty, you capture the fingerprints anyway. If the eye is infected, you capture the irises anyway.
But when you get into the healthcare arena, cleanliness is next to you-know-what.
Ethylene Oxide (EtO) gas is one of the most common ways to sterilize medical devices, a safe, tightly controlled, highly regulated process which is critical for preventing infections and ensuring patients have safe surgeries and medical treatments.
And in some cases, EtO is the ONLY way to sterilize some medical devices.
EtO is a human carcinogen. It causes cancer in humans. Scientific evidence in humans indicates that regular exposure to EtO over many years increases the risk of cancers of the white blood cells, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma, myeloma, and lymphocytic leukemia. Studies also show that long-term exposure to EtO increases the risk of breast cancer in women.
Workers who use EtO as a part of their jobs and people who work, live, or go to school or daycare near facilities that use EtO may breathe in EtO at levels that can increase cancer risk.
So there are companies (I won’t name them here, but you can find them) who specialize in mitigating EtO risk to humans.
From the early 1990s to 2019, the majority of my identity/biometric proposal work was with U.S. state and local agencies, with some work with foreign agencies (such as Canada’s RCMP), private entities, and a few proposals to U.S. federal agencies.
I had no idea what was going to happen in 2020, and one of the surprises is that the majority of my identity/biometric proposal work since 2020 has been with U.S. federal agencies. Many requests for information (RFIs) as well as other responses.
The L & N, not M, but close enough for government work.
I’ve worked on client proposals (and Bredemarket’s own responses) to the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and perhaps some others along the way.
And no, there’s no uniformity
Same department, different requirements.
Coincidentally, the two most recent identity/biometric proposals I managed for Bredemarket clients went to the same government department. But that’s where the similarities ended.
The first required an e-mail submission of a PDF (10 pages maximum) to two email addresses. A relative piece of cake.
Mmm…cake. Always reward your proposal people.
The last required an online submission. No, not a simple upload of a PDF to a government website. While my client did have to upload 2 PDFs, the majority of the submission required my client to complete a bunch of online screens.
And there were two separate sets of instructions regarding how to complete these online screens…which contradicted each other. So I had to ask a clarification question…and you know how THAT can go.
Oh, and as the consulting proposal expert, I could not complete the online screens on behalf of the client. The client’s company had a single login, which was assigned to a single person (a company executive) and could NOT be used by anybody else.
So on the day of proposal submission the executive and I videoconferenced, and I watched as the executive answered the responses, in part using a document in which I had drafted responses.
And of course things were not perfect. The executive pasted one of my responses into the space provided, and only THEN did we discover that the response had an unadvertised character limit. So I rewrote it…at the same time that I resized a required image with unadvertised dimension restrictions.
But there’s some uniformity
Perhaps if I had written more federal proposals at Printrak, Motorola, MorphoTrak, IDEMIA, and Incode, I would have known these things. Perhaps not; as late as 2014 I was still printing proposals on paper and submitting 10 or more volumes of binders (yes, binders) along with CDs that had to be virus-checked.
Some Requests for Proposal (RFPs) provide helpful checklists.
But regardless of whether you submit proposals online, via CD, or in paper volumes, some things remain constant.
Follow the instructions.
Answer the questions.
Emphasize the benefits.
And don’t misspell the name of the Contracting Officer.
Bredemarket 