Foibles of user "security" questions

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Fri Jan 11 22:20:53 EST 2008


Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de> writes:
>* Jerry Leichter:
>> I can just see the day when someone's fingerprint is rejected as
>> "insufficiently complex".
>It's been claimed that once you reach the retirement age, one person in ten
>hasn't got any fingerprints which can be used for biometric purposes.

It's not just older people, it's manual workers, children, and (as a
generalisation for all biometrics) "goats", the percentage of the overall
population who don't produce useful results for whatever biometric is being
employed.  The population of goats (for a reasonable FAR/FRR) is usually in
the low single digits.  The standard response to goats is to wind down the FRR
until the problem is no longer noticeable.  More on this in
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/biometrics.pdf.

(FAR = false acceptance rate, FRR = false rejection rate).

Peter.

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