"Retailers Experiment With Biometric Payment" article

Adam Shostack adam at homeport.org
Thu Jun 9 12:02:20 EDT 2005


On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 11:17:59AM -0400, Heyman, Michael wrote:
| From
| <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/08/AR20050
| 60802335_pf.html>:

|   share its biometric data with government agencies, and 
|   in fact, the full fingerprints are not stored in the 
|   system. Instead, a complex mathematical algorithm is 
|   created to represent identifying characteristics of 
|   the fingerprint, which are matched to the real thing 
|   when a user shows up at a checkout counter.
|
| No discussion on the threat of finger removal...
| 

Has anyone ever studied the reversability of these algorithms?  It
seems to me that you could make some plausible guesses and generate
fingerprints from certain representations.  I don't know how likely
those guesses are to be right.

Adam

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