mother's maiden names...

Perry E. Metzger perry at piermont.com
Thu Jul 14 09:02:57 EDT 2005


pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) writes:
> "Perry E. Metzger" <perry at piermont.com> writes:
>
>>Why is it, then, that banks are not taking digital photographs of customers
>>when they open their accounts so that the manager's computer can pop up a
>>picture for him, which the bank has had in possession the entire time and
>>which I could not have forged?
>
> I don't know about photos specifically, but I know that signature
> imprints are often still moved around by laborious manual means
> because the background infrastructure to handle images doesn't
> exist.  Most banks are still using 3270-style interfaces, even if
> they have a screen-scraped GUI front-end.

That's true. Several banks I deal with in New York use displays that
are disturbingly 3270-like. That brings up another thing that has
always tickled the back of my mind -- I have never actually had a
professional opportunity to analyze any of the systems used by tellers
in commercial banks, and I always wonder at what is securing the links
between small branches and HQ, and how bad the protection of the user
passwords etc. might be...

> So using images (of any kind) isn't just a case of making an executive
> decision to do so, it would involve a massive, end-to-end infrastructure
> upgrade to implement.

Yah, true enough -- which also impedes things like letting branch
managers to look at check images, signatures, etc. Groan...


Perry

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