Biometrics
As part of the 4th year of my Bachelor of Science at the Australian National University, it was required that I produce an honours thesis. For my project, I researched "The risk of masquerade arising from the storage of biometrics", under the supervision of Dr Roger Clarke.
My intent was to counter some of the myths surrounding biometric technologies in the literature that was available at the time. Specifically, the myth: that stored biometrics pose no threat to their owner if they are stolen, because it is not possible to recreate the original biometric from the stored data.
While it is correct that it is (in nearly all cases) not possible to recreate the original biometric exactly, I demonstrated that it is possible to recreate a similar biometric artefact. This artefact (or copy) is, as far as the biometric scanners are concerned, equivalent to the original biometric provided to the system.
This means that while a third party will not be able to generate the original biometric, they will be able to generate something that is close enough to it that they can successfully masquerade as another individual after regenerating a biometric artefact from a stored template.
You can read the thesis abstract or if you wish to read the thesis in its entirety, please download it from here:
Thesis as a pdf file (~5.25MB)
