Iris scanners tricked by hackers

What started off as the realm of science fiction has since been made reality for quite some time already in terms of security – I am talking about iris scanners playing its role as one of the most secure biometric security measures to date. However, it does seem to run into a particularly niggling problem – hackers have managed to trick these iris scanners into believing that whatever it scanned is the genuine article, giving access in the process. No, the hackers did not do anything gross like steal someone’s eyeballs, but rather, they managed to replicate a person’s eye using digital codes of real irises which are stashed away in security databases.

Having said that, fresh doubts would be raised over the status of the iris scanner as being one of the more secure methods in the world of biometric security, will it not? So far, experiments have showed that these fake irises will still be able to trick an iris scanner 80% of the time into believing that it was a human real eye in place.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: biometric